247 karma · joined February 2, 2016
I can definitely relate to the frustration! It's been years since I've worked on the product side myself, but for what it's worth we do allow equipping up to 2 streak freezes now. I believe you can also restore a lost streak as an in-app purchase; I've never done so myself.
That's also a great point about NLP etc. I was kinda hoping that my "Average daily log entries" would show some kind of trend like that, but I guess it was too simplistic. It really might be worth recording journal data and just assuming that the tools for analysis will catch up later.
I basically see myself as a garden variety introvert. I suppose that in an informal sense, I might be further along the spectrum than the median person off the street, but then again I suspect the same is true of many other software engineers - especially HN readers.
So generally no, but technically maybe? IANAD
For example, I could record stress on a 1-10 scale. Do I just put 11 for a day of unprecedented stress? Or should 10 always represent the global maximum thus far? More generally, how do I ensure consistency with myself?
I do vividly remember the stressful times in my life and can see their effects in the blog post's charts. I figured it's probably best to preserve at least some of my own privacy, although I did touch on this a bit when discussing music.
All that said, I have friends who journal and I might end up trying it too out of fear of losing data (even if it's squishy). Maybe once a week would be a sustainable cadence?
I'd probably improve faster by taking music lessons, but improvement is really a secondary goal after having fun. For what it's worth, I do still get some feedback from bandmates and my own ear - recording your own playing and trying to mix it into something presentable makes it painfully clear what needs work!
I've just uploaded a new APK that should hopefully work!
If you're wondering where it could appear in the charts, any one of the Sleep/People/Exercise/Other categories would seem a possible candidate...
2. It's not surprising that lack of sleep can get you feeling down. But since starting to track myself, I've been more conscious of the fact that whenever I'm feeling down, it's almost always after a night or two of bad sleep! I now take sleep a lot more seriously and ask myself first whether I've been sleeping well whenever I'm feeling down (as opposed to blaming other people, etc). This is especially important since I tend to ignore what my body tries to tell me.
3. The 7.5 hour average has remained roughly constant month over month for the entire decade. It's hard to say how much of an effect that other variables like exercise have since I always aim for 7-8 hours regardless. I do notice that if I get like 4 hours one night, I'll end up sleeping more than usual for the next night or two.
A rough analogy: you can figure out from your HP bar how much damage you take from each hit, and it's probably worth doing so if you're going to be fighting these same baddies forever and have no other way of knowing, but the HP bar also serves other important purposes related to resource management: it gives you a sense of how you're doing overall, and it constantly reminds you that HP management is even worth caring about.
1. I have sole ownership of the data
2. The data is stored in an easily parsable format (TSV)
3. Duplicating a recent activity takes one tap
4. Pie and area charts are displayed in the app
My app is open source and available on GitHub[1] for any Android developer to compile for themselves, but if there's enough interest I can also get around to packaging it up for the Play Store/F-Droid/etc.