Ask HN: Do you track data about your life? Has it helped or led to insights?

8 points by blinduck 11 years ago | 8 comments

Do you track data about your life over time? I'm thinking about things like weight, bodyfat%, sleep hours, food eaten and productivity?

What software do you use to do so? Has it led to any interesting results?

tangentcity 11 years ago |

I was recently at a Quantified Self meeting in Amsterdam. I met the most fascinating bunch of people, but the chief insight came from hearing his friends give a tribute to the late Seth Roberts at the end of the seminar. The take-home lesson there is that you don't need to wait for results of complicated and expensive controlled clinical trials, but you can experiment on yourself, observe the results, and adjust accordingly. Myself, I have enjoyed wearing a Nike FuelBand, which did bring home the difference walking around talking to people during a day at the office makes in my general fitness (step count) and well-being (subjective). The Withings WiFi scale has been huge to track the effects of exercise and a Paleo diet. A normal scale would have told me that my weight hasn't changed in the 9 months I've changed those habits. The body impedance read from the Withings scale gives noisy but overall reliable body-fat data, and that shows me I've exchanged 10 lbs of fat for as much muscle. I've also noticed that a few days with less than about 5 hours of sleep will send my body fat creeping back up. Invaluable and extremely reinforcing in a positive way.

thomasmeagher 11 years ago |

I use an iOS app called, Reporter (http://www.reporter-app.com/). It prompts you with push notifications to answer a set of custom questions throughout the day- Are you looking at a screen? Who are you with? Where are you? How many cups of coffee have you had?

The reports also capture "background" data using the phones sensors: number of steps, temperature, volume, elevation, phone battery, etc.

Its great for lightweight tracking and all the data can be exported in CSV or JSON formats. Reporter can definitely help you track sleep hours, food eaten, and productivity (weight and body fat % can also be captured).

I wrote an article about the 500 reports I've captured over the last 107 days: https://medium.com/p/c4454b9d8456

blinduck 11 years ago | |

Thanks! Definitely gonna check this out.

nreece 11 years ago |

I've been tracking my time, finances, health etc. for a little while. Wrote a blog post about the benefits of 'personal analytics' earlier this year: http://www.nilkanth.com/2014/04/11/will-you-take-100-now-or-...

crazypyro 11 years ago |

Not sure if you have seen it, but every once in a while people post a link to this guy's blog where he attempts to track a large number of body/life statistics everyday. The name of the site eludes me though. It was really well made and designed. Maybe someone can help me....

strick 11 years ago | |

http://feltron.com/

crazypyro 11 years ago | | |

There was another one that was posting their stuff for free, although less detailed. The site was heavily designed.