2012 Personal Annual Report
jehiah.cz
jehiah.cz
It took me a while, but then it hit me: This is a beautiful display of inputs.
Where are the outputs?
Where is the gorgeous dashboard that shows the results of all your hard work and the benefits that others got from them? That's something I'd love to see.
I think there's some utility, and certainly some novelty in taking a very frank look at what you've done in a year. I'm sure that there are short, personal moments and achievements from this year that define it for him. Lessons learned, moments of growth, of love, of victory and of failure.
However, this is looking not at the interesting individual moments, but at the more mundane (but plentiful) every day things.
Given that, I'd love to see a follow up post of what the year meant to the OP on a more personal level. A blog post that covers those moments of growth, love, learning, and victory.
As a parent, I have often wondered how much of my time is spent changing diapers, getting water/milk/juice for my kids, overseeing clean-up time, doing bathtime, reading, etc. I'd love to be able to look at a metric of this over the course of a year. If, at the end of the year, I had an annual report which included all of that (and work time), it would be very interesting to me as a way to understand my life better. I already think of myself as a parent, and know that these are the costs of being one, but that's not the only way I think of my life in a year.
The huge Computer Activity break in the first half of August stood out to me.
I'm going to try to track some of my data this year. I'm more interested in health data - sleep, exercise etc. It'll be interesting to see how other activities relate to sleep and exercise.
I'd love to do some of this information tracking, but nearly all of the data that I've seen comes from DIY setups, with custom tracking systems. Does anyone know of any open source projects that do this, or are willing to post their own solutions?
Michel Foucault on Bentham's Panopticon Prison design, which utilized a ring of cells around a central guard tower.
As an aside: I think that is an interesting analysis of the Panopticon (which I hadn't heard of before) but I think that writing is needlessly wordy.
Of course there is a bit more in parsing the data you gather and creating reports/doing whatever, but the monitoring part should be easy enough.
for the computer activity i took a snapshot every 30seconds of what program was active, and how long my laptop was active.
Some of the other scripts just download data from foursquare's API, and post processing transaction download from Mint. Hopefully I'll have time to clean and post those scripts.
My rough approach to post processing this data was to group by 6 minute intervals, and to drop any records where the computer was inactive for more than 120 seconds.
- Logs active website from Chrome
- Stores time including local timezone (interesting to see what timezones I'm in)
- File name includes hostname
Is this purely for kicks, or are you trying to use it to drive behavioral changes (e.g. spend less on coffee)? I ask because I always think about doing this, but I get a stuck on the "why".
The motivation for me is a way to learn about my year (not directly to change my actions), and part a fun exercise to get better at data processing, javascript, and UI Interaction/charting. I like the hard deadline that a personal annual report creates naturally (ie: it's no good if i release it in june).
Found it really useful to be able to literally play back my day in 10 second intervals. Unfortunately it's windows-only. One of the very few apps I truly miss since moving to Linux almost 2 years ago.
-- I have absolutely no affiliation with TimeSnapper besides being a happily paying customer a couple years ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5021896
I think that "to get better at data processing, javascript, and UI Interaction/charting" is a perfectly valid answer. But in general, I tend to be wary of visualizations that don't ultimately inform some decision making process.
There was a really awesome program called Wakoopa that tracked program usage for a few years, but they shut down their social portion last year :( http://social.wakoopa.com/
I've highlighted some last.fm data in a few of my previous annual reports, but it didn't make it this year (I Wasn't quite into new music enough recently for it to be interesting to me).
I'm all for a proper beard!
Is there an official way of measuring beard length?
probably best to measure it in time. that is, a clean shave is length 0, time since last shave estimates length. If you use an electric shaver, the settings on the shaver associate to a known length. If you trim with scissors... that's a bit trickier.
The transition from Carte Blanche to Burbon Coffee in the middle of the year is when @bitly's office moved, and my coffee habit followed.
https://gist.github.com/4477040 is the cron script I use on a 10 min interval.
There might be other ways to do this now days, but i've used this successfully for a few years.
https://github.com/zacstewart/dotfiles/blob/master/git/.git_...
glad you enjoyed the report.