The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable:
> Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.
In my experience, tracking objective things like "nutrition" and "sleep hours" is immensely useful to reflect on what went wrong, and tracking subjective things like "mood" or "stress" is useless given hedonic adaptation or heavy swings that make problems obvious, and not need tracking.
What's key is be able to visualize metrics easily on the data and frictionless data entry, I've got a decent setup with iPhone Action + Obsidian + QuickAdd scripts on Obsidian Sync (mobile + laptop). for visualization I use Obsidian Bases and Obsidian notes that run Dataview code blocks and Chart.js, couldn't be happier.
I could track things that are not interesting to reflect on like vitamin D supplementation for accountability but I've never bothered, especially if it's taken ~daily.
I get that everyone wants to be cynical about this, but you really can't deny that both the visualization and sheer scale of data is impressive. The way the "my life in weeks" is done is also very cool, I'll be stealing that for myself.
An interesting experiment, I think I'm too uncomfortable leaking data I don't yet know why someone would curate to me free of charge until I knew.
If there was a FOSS suite like Home Assistant that would do a few of those things I might try it out, especially the weather (I would add air quality) correlation to mood and other subjective states.
This might sound harsh but for someone who is keen on investing time to track so many things, you should invest some time in learning how to make better visualizations. A few tweaks here and there would really improve what you have.
This was far more interesting than I first thought it would be when clicking the link. In particular, the place/time and life events and such being presented this way told a story and was fun.
Related to this, I highly recommend anyone to install github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch, it's an amazing tool to keep track of your computer use completely locally. I think there are lots of possibilities with data analysis/AI aimed to improved one self's life
I had an idea similar to this where you could add information about yourself and answer daily questions and get paid by companies who access this data. This could be an ethical way to share information benefitting all parties.
A simple back of the envelope calculation shows that Felix causes between 70 and 110 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year just from flying.
Paris accord says 1.5t per person per year, from all activities, Felix's flying alonre is ~10-15x current European yearly per person emissions and ~50-75x those compatible with +1.5C.
> Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 3 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather.
I know this is the type of person i would not like.
61 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 49.8 ms ] thread> Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.
/edit: quantified, not qualified
What's key is be able to visualize metrics easily on the data and frictionless data entry, I've got a decent setup with iPhone Action + Obsidian + QuickAdd scripts on Obsidian Sync (mobile + laptop). for visualization I use Obsidian Bases and Obsidian notes that run Dataview code blocks and Chart.js, couldn't be happier.
I could track things that are not interesting to reflect on like vitamin D supplementation for accountability but I've never bothered, especially if it's taken ~daily.
Paris accord says 1.5t per person per year, from all activities, Felix's flying alonre is ~10-15x current European yearly per person emissions and ~50-75x those compatible with +1.5C.
I know this is the type of person i would not like.