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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

We all may be suffering from a case of Fortune 100 CEO syndrome. That is, we all wish our lives are so busy and important that we need personal assistants managing our lives.

So we buy these products that make us feel more important. It documents what we do, and it tells back our story through a dashboard, in an autobiographical way, as if we're some kind of celebrities.

But are we that important?

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    > We all may be suffering from a case of Fortune 100 CEO 
    > syndrome. That is, we all wish our lives are so busy and
    > important that we need personal assistants managing our
    > lives.

How important or busy do I need to be to decide that £160 is too much to spend freeing up some of my time? How about to decide to take a minicab home if it frees up 30m of my time vs public transport?

I think the bar to "busy and important enough" is much lower than you think.

It's all about measurable goals and improvements, not about importance.

Goals and improvements are important, but are these tools really effective, or are they praying on our vanity? How effective can this possibly measure how many cups of coffee or water I am drinking, how many steps I'm taking, if I'm medications or not, etc.

This one takes the cake.

"Get notified if the fridge door is left open and it gets warmer. At the same time, keep track of your snacking between meals."

I think his point is that this doesn't provide much in the way of meaningful measurements or analytics. It's not actually a better way to, say, track soda consumption--it's just more self-aggrandizing.

I don't know if that's actually true, I would like a tool to keep track of this stuff for me but I don't at all feel some "desire to be a celebrity with assistants." Yes I suppose I could carry a notebook everywhere. I have failed doing that in the past though and I don't know anyone that keeps such detailed statistics. Especially on things like the exact time they wake up, come home, get coffee, etc. I imagine it would be a hassle to manually keep track of it all.

I try, and for periods have succeeded, in tracking my diet and weight in detail, partly to support my exercise and partly because I'm prone to over-eating... The biggest challenge is that it needs to be extremely simple. A notebook sort-of works - it's easy to jot something down -, but with the caveat that taking the time to transfer notes and add up calories etc. to actually get any use of it is slow.

Smartphone works for me, but only with an app that is tailored to my workflow. Sensors that could capture lots of it semi-automatically would make a great deal of difference.

Soda - no, but it doesn't stop at soda, it even doesn't start there. A lot of valid use cases for generating/analyzing this data.

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