
Ask HN: What do you track? - miguelrochefort
I recently rediscovered the quantified self movement [1] and I was wondering what other people here keep track of.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Quantified_self
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Jemaclus
I started keeping a bullet journal a year ago. In my "monthly" view, I have a
habit/mood tracker, so I track several things including:

\- how my day went (good/okay/bad)

\- predominant mood (happy/meh/sad/angry/stressed/lonely)

\- talking to family (mom/dad/siblings)

\- hours slept

\- run / exercise / other high level of activity

\- reading / podcast / music / writing

\- dine out, order in, cook

\- social stuff, like whether I hung out with friends or had date night or saw
a movie/play or...

My original goal was that I was feeling depressed and angry sometimes, and I
wanted to see if there was something in my habits/moods that would give me a
clue as to what it was. It turns out that I have a TON of "okay" days and a
lot of "bad" days, but very few "good" days. The only correlation I can see is
that "bad" days correlate with "angry" moods, which makes sense. Beyond that,
not much insight...

Like many others, I track my exercise through Strava and via the Activities
app on my Apple Watch.

I'd like to track more things, but haven't figured out what other metrics I
want to keep track of...

~~~
miguelrochefort
Nutrition is probably the most useful metrics, but it's also requires the most
work. I'm still trying to figure out a way to simplify it. For now, I just
take pictures of my meals (I always eat out).

Tracking your time can also be very useful. Imagine being able to know what
you were doing 5 years ago at 2PM, or how much time you spent on Hacker News
over the past month.

~~~
Jemaclus
I've thought about tracking my meals, but I don't think I really care enough
to know what I ate on which days. That's why I tend to have a simple view on
my monthly tracker as a proxy for "cook" (usually healthy), "order in" (never
healthy), or "dine out" (depends, but about 50/50). I know people that log
everything they eat, but it just winds up being too verbose for me.

I'm really not disciplined enough to keep track of my actual time to that
degree. My daily journal is a little bit more of an event log, where I log my
schedule for the day and anything interesting that happened. Some days it's
very long, some days it's short, but I get something in there every day.

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shoo
For a year or two i used to manually track all weekly spend, to help stick to
a budget. No software involved, just noting spend on a paper spreadsheet at
the end of each day, & summing up weekly totals. I don't do this any more,
instead just periodically review expenses (using logs from bank transactions)
and have a think if I need to make any adjustments in habits or shop around
for better deals for utilities, insurance, etc. I still track ratio of savings
to income net tax, but it's only worth calculating this once or twice a year
or when thinking about decisions with a large financial impact (moving house,
changing job, etc...)

Quite a few years ago when i was trying to build a habit of getting more
exercise i had a calendar & i'd mark the days where i'd cycled/jogged/swum,
and perhaps the number of laps. Again, low-tech physical paper calendar + a
marker, sitting somewhere where I'd be forced to notice it. It helped build
habits.

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askafriend
My Apple Watch helps me track my general activity and my sleeping
patterns/quality. I use another app to help track my gym workouts.

I record way more than I review. Most of the time I record out of habit, not
because I'm actively doing anything with the granular data.

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_fourzerofour
As an undergrad (I'm going to go ahead and assume that there aren't many here,
proportionally) I primarily track my studies, since my manager tracks my
efforts at work, and I have apps to handle tracking my progress in the gym.

So the conscious "tracking" boils down to maintaining a spreadsheet, with each
university subject as its own sheet. My uni forces unit coordinators to
publish a guide at the beginning of the semester with all of the structure
therein; when assessments are going to be due, how they're expected to be
handed in, what the weekly schedule is, what marking criteria there will be,
et cetera.

This makes it really easy to set that up as a simple checklist - I just make a
table for each subject's sheet, with the columns as regularly occurring tasks
(e.g.: submitting worksheet problems) and the rows as weeks. Actually I just
used it today to see what was slipping through the cracks, since this past
week has been heavy in terms of assignments and the week-to-week busywork fell
by the wayside.

Although when it comes to the quality of the work, that's more of maintaining
the right perspective and frame of mind moving into it. I can't put a number
on how many problems I should solve, for example, but I can qualitatively
picture the fluency in expression and recall I'll have when I'm successfully
answering those problems. That image in my mind helps me motivate myself way
more, and it keeps me sharp.

~~~
CardenB
You should move your spreadsheet to coda.io! Much easier to create these
systems.

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AKhoo
Quantitatively, there's two things I track daily: (1) My progress at the gym
(which, surprisingly I track in an ongoing draft email*) and (2) the number of
productive work hours I've worked that day (to make sure I'm not just bumming
around).

Qualitatively, I have a bunch of reflection questions I ask myself in the AM
and in the PM and I log my answers in a journal electronically. LMK if you'd
like to learn more!

P.S. Is this crazy? Does anyone else keep a running notepad using draft
emails?

~~~
miguelrochefort
I'd like to learn more.

Yes, I think it's crazy to keep gym progress in an ongoing draft email. If you
discard the draft, you lose everything. I frequently take notes by sending
emails to myself (and replying to that email to add details), but I never
leave it as a draft.

~~~
AKhoo
IT HAPPENED. I clicked the wrong button on my phone today and lost a few
months of notes. Instantly thought of this message haha. Going to transition
to Google Keep instead....

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jakub-swierk
For last 223 days i have keep track of:

\- Consumed food (weight, calories, fat, carbons, proteins, salt).

\- Budget (detailed, every product in separate row with 5 tags).

\- Weight (daily).

\- Time spend on every site.

\- Time spend on games.

\- Sleep and steps by smartband.

\- Over 20 habits like hygiene, keeping away from soda drinks.

\- What i have done at work with minute accuracy

Everything except smartband and browsing stats is tracked by three
spreadsheets.

One thing: Tracking some of habits can be two edged sword. It can push you to
do things you do not want to do.

~~~
miguelrochefort
I'm tracking similar things (food, water, medication, spending, location,
sleep, steps, heart rate, hygiene, time).

\- I track my computer usage with RescueTime and my Chrome history. \- I track
my non-cash spending using Mint. \- I track my sleep, steps, and heart rate
using a smartband. \- I track my food and cash spending by taking pictures
(item and receipt) \- I track my time by completely filling my Google Calendar
(rounding to the nearest 15 minutes). \- I track everything else using a
timestamped journal app.

How much work does it take you to track all of this? I'm especially interested
in how you track nutritional values, as I've tried MyFitnessPal in the past
but quickly gave up.

I'm looking for ways to automate/delegate/facilitate my tracking process. I
think this is data everyone should know about themselves, but I can't
recommend most people to track all of this because it takes too much work.

~~~
jakub-swierk
I took me about 20-30 minutes every evening, except morning weighing on scale
and tracking my work.

Nutritional is written down on simple spreadsheet. One big table with row
like: name, weight, calories, fat, carbons, proteins, salt. Many of the
products have nutrition table, rest is easy to find on sites like [1]. Also,
after some time you can copy and paste most of the rows.

Every day is summed up and compared to ideal diet and weight change of next
day.

[1]: [http://www.ilewazy.pl/srednia-marchew](http://www.ilewazy.pl/srednia-
marchew)

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kasey_junk
I use a device called the rainforest eagle to read my smart meter. I wrote a
Prometheus exporter for it and now get pretty high resolution power usage
data.

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lukaszkups
\- Sport activity (running, endomondo),

\- Web traffic (cloudflare analytics),

\- hours spent on gaming (steam/ps4 stats),

\- Github daily contributions

