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But you didn’t spend hundreds of hours on it, so when it did happen to be useful it seemed like an outsized benefit.

I would wager that for most people, most data about themselves will be useless and not worth collecting.

Of course you can’t know what data will be useless or not, so unless the cost of collecting it is minimal or nil (wearing a smart watch, writing down your weight each day/week), it’s probably not worth it.

Spending hundreds of hours to build a solution to capture all data about yourself to find interesting patterns has a huge assumption baked into it: that there are interesting patterns to find.

Like anything else, I think it comes down to having a good use case.

I've gotten deep into weightlifting/bodybuilding over the past couple of years, and that's the kind of hobby where micro-optimizations and data tracking can have a pretty big impact on results (and sort of necessary, you can't fly blind with things like diet, especially)

E.g. I track and weigh everything I eat, take body measuraments on a weekly basis, Dexa scans every few months, etc - for me it's worth it because I know what I want to do with the data. If I didn't have a goal, all that tracking would clearly be overkill.

How long have you been tracking? Can you share an insight you've had from your data?

I've been weight lighting for ten years and initially tried to track things (down to how many reps I did of which exercise, with how much weight) and quickly came to the conclusion that is want worth it for me.

I track the reps weights of every exercise (in my own app). But the historical values are only useful up to last couple of weeks just to now if the general trends go up and what is stalled. Unless your goals are the numbers themselves and not health, I don’t think there is a reason to track everything. But it is fun.

The goal in bodybuilding during a gaining phase is to be in a very slight calories surplus (200-300 calories above maintenance, at most) to maximize the amount of time you're building muscle before you need to cut again (bring calories back to a deficit to shed body fat).

Tracking scale weight is difficult because shifts in water weight and hydration can swing the scale 5+ pounds in either direction without any change in body fat. So I pair scale weight with a 7-point skin caliper measurements taken on a weekly basis, along with waist circumference, in order to infer whether body fat is trending up or down. And also take weekly progress photos of 6 angles/poses with consistent lighting, which I share with a coach.

And then you pair that with weighing and logging everything you eat, and you can make small adjustments to your meal plan on a monthly basis to try to stay in that 200-300 calorie per day surplus for as long as possible. (Although most bodybuilding coaches adjust diet based purely on how your physique is changing in weekly check-in photos without the need for measurements, but I like extra data)

> down to how many reps I did of which exercise, with how much weight)

I also do this. Track every exercise, every weight, number of reps. It's necessary for knowing whether you're progressively overloading over long periods of time. Progressive overload becomes harder to measure once you're past newbie gains because you can't increase weight every week, so some weeks the goal is just to squeeze out an extra couple of reps. Which adds up over time

This is obviously excessive for 99% of people. But I enjoy doing it as a hobby. I would absolutely not recommend this level of tracking for health reasons (not necessary) - I find enjoyment in the process.

I initially came to the same conclusion. Though I lifted in accord with decent training principles regarding reps and sets, I didn't track for years. As I entered middle age, I started keeping a training log (just one big org file in emacs), mostly out of curiousity. As I entered my 50s, I experienced what Haruki Murakami references in "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" --- Fat is easy to gain and hard to lose. Muscle is hard to gain and easy to lose. Now I track a couple of critical metrics and it's working great. I weigh first thing every day, track all kcals (even if I overeat), plan and track workouts. I write my own plans pulled from principles in these books (don't work for the company, just a satisfied customer) https://muscleandstrengthpyramids.com/ I don't use the vast majority of the info in those books as I'm just a hobbyist who wants to be healthy and strong. The biggest shift came from learning I was doing waaay too much training volume at the gym while trying to lose fat too quickly; a fine recipe for injury. Now, when I'm in a fat loss phase, I try to lose it as slowly as possible while still making progress. Strength training and fat loss is a very long very slow marathon, not a sprint. Perhaps paradoxically, the awareness that's come from tracking has helped me relax. No need to major in the minors; pretty good is pretty good. The tools I use are a scale, loseit, and org-mode.

True, if you have a current and real need for the data, then it makes sense to collect it. But that’s an entirely different scenario.

Right, but you don't necessarily need to spend hundreds of hours to capture most of this; the data is already out there. If there were a tool that could collect it all in one place and give you insights with minimal effort that would be pretty neat.

agree. I would never do what OP did. But I also won't throw out my smart watch (Context: other people in the thread said they stopped using them because the data was useless)

Yes, I developed Health Hub https://biomarkeroptimizers.com/tools/health-hub/ to visualize and analyze my blood work, food, exercise, and sensor data from various sources, thinking it can be also useful for others.

About 9 years ago I had a run-in with stomach cancer. After a few months of chemo and a 7 hour operation I was eventually declared cancer free and have been ever since, but still have to live with the consequences of the treatment and be vigilant for any signs of it returning.

I still suffer intermittent stomach aches, especially in the early hours of the morning, and had a terrible time trying to decide if they were getting better or worse over time.

Our narrative voice is awful at detecting long term trends and tends to overcompensate for particularly good or bad patches so it was impossible for me to judge and I started keeping records of how bad the aches were each day.

Long story short, the average severity was mostly decreasing over time and the average time between bad aches was slowly increasing but it would have been impossible to tell if this was happening without keeping detailed records because it wasn't consistent - some months were much worse than others and completely skewed my perception of long term trends.

While most people hopefully won't ever need to do something like this, it did make me realise just how bad we are at picking up on long term trends so I can definitely see keeping daily records of, for instance, average daily happiness being eye-opening.

Yes, when you have an obvious reason to track some data, do it: I do not think anyone questions that.

Proactively capturing and tracking everything you can to prep for any future is too much work that would really steal your time from, you know, actually living a life.

Sounds like you had a very good reason to be tracking your stomachaches. But almost everyone else aside from you And people In similar situations would be wasting their time doing that, I would imagine.

> Data can feel useless for 10 years until one day it becomes critical. The benefit is spiky and uneven.

Not sure if in your case the data was critical, since the doctor likely would have just had you wear a monitor for a while after to come to the same conclusion.

My first car had a broken speedometer. It was a "hand" style like a clock. Instead of moving to the speed, it would spin 365 degrees. The faster the car went, the faster it would spin. Turns out, I acclimated to it and generally knew what speed i was going (relatively speaking).

The lesson, I think, is everything is relative. Even a dashboard with flawed data that is "consistent" can highlight anomalies. And often, that's all you really need out of them. (Or the lack of anomaly)

This is the obvious "benefit" of hindsight. Yes, you accidentally had access to data that provided historical patterns you exactly could use.

But, for anyone who does, there is another 1000 who do not when something hits them: many illnesses develop gradually, and all of our tests (thousands of blood tests, scans and imaging tech...) would benefit from having historical data when we were "ok".

Similarly, you probably did not have more data than what Apple provided to help narrow the problem you still had, right?

And if everyone was put under so many tests, we'd actually be "solving" a bunch of non-issues for people over-reacting to small deviations from "normal" range.

Apple watch helps you with a few parameters — not to be discounted — but I don't really see it as a counter.

Collecting data is great.

But I see people start min-maxing these numbers as a replacement for big picture health goals.

From the outside, I see someone spending a lot of time focusing on numbers while they are actually regularly stressed, who doesn’t get good sleep, and has somewhat bare minimum exercise.

Collecting data is great but don’t sink so much effort into it until you have a problem.

This was great because you didn't put much effort into it. Whereas the conclusion was about "it is not worth building your own solution".

So what happened with your symptoms?