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Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

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Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#21

Post by jimnotgym »

The bigger question you should ask yourself, is what are you hoping to gain by tracking? I mean if you were getting results from Google sheets you would be using it today.

If you want to make it a product you need to do it in a way that makes people less paranoid, allows them to enjoy their life, doesn't try to guilt or game them into staying involved, doesn't have, lots of notifications and makes their life better as a whole. I mean it's not healthy to think about your illness 24/7.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#22

Post by SoftTalker »

FranklinMaillot wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what you want to track but I'd recommend becoming a stationary nerd . Experiment with different notebooks, paper quality, try fountain pens, pencils, pastels... Pick the combination that brings you joy. If you find pleasure in the tactile act of putting ink (or graphite) on paper, you'll never want to quit journaling. Believe me. I'm only half joking. Physical, handmade artefacts beat everything else, an…

I have to agree. At my gym, the people who seem to track their training mostly use paper notebooks. Even the younger people who otherwise live on their phones or post instagram videos of all their lifts. I don't notice many people using apps. Though it can be hard to tell, because e.g. a smart watch may be tracking some things automatically, or an app may have computed the workout in advance.

I personally don't track anymore. I was using a Google Sheet on my phone but it didn't really seem to add any value. Now I just remember what my reps and weights are for the main lifts I do.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#23

Post by Jeremy1026 »

arionhardison wrote: post #16
ghostly_s wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're operating a third-party Medicare guide at "medicare.dev" with no visible disclaimer anywhere that you are not affiliated with Medicare?

No, its not a guide and there are disclaims literally everywhere. As long as you don't use the gov bar (at top of all gov websites) its OK. I work w/ people from CMS daily.

Where are the disclaimers? I've clicked around, and nothing is really clear what this is, or what it isn't.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#24

Post by geocrasher »

xlii wrote: post #20

Try "Tiny Habits" by BJ Fogg. I found it quite interesting and I implemented few habits by using it. Though there's ADHD and other neurodivergent scenarios, and when you have it making anything of a habit is a hard work.

Hi, ADHD here. I bought Tiny Habits. I tried reading it. Didn't get very far. You can imagine why...

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#25

Post by arionhardison »

arionhardison wrote: post #16
ghostly_s wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're operating a third-party Medicare guide at "medicare.dev" with no visible disclaimer anywhere that you are not affiliated with Medicare?

No, its not a guide and there are disclaims literally everywhere. As long as you don't use the gov bar (at top of all gov websites) its OK. I work w/ people from CMS daily.

They are in the programs, when you make your program; it explains things very clearly.

Medicare.dev - clearly sates, as all Gov. websites do that its an official Gov. website etc... My literature here clearly states - for people that actually are using it - this is a functional healthcare utility, even if you google or ask ask - its a very clear distinction that is made.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#26

Post by andai »

You can get a guy online to call you every day and yell at you if you didn't do the thing.[0] That's probably what's missing here, some kind of external pressure to do the thing.

At least that's what I've found helpful, I couldn't rely on willpower for long term behavior change, so I just change my environment in a way that makes doing the thing become the path of least resistance.

Or you could tie it to an existing habit like, "I'm not allowed to brush my teeth in the morning until I logged how shit I feel today." But I'd definitely consider just getting the guy who checks "did you do the thing?"

[0] I've seen ads online for people doing this for like $1/day.

I also found this very helpful and refer to it on a regular basis:

https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits-summary

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#27

Post by arionhardison »

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #23
arionhardison wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its not a guide and there are disclaims literally everywhere. As long as you don't use the gov bar (at top of all gov websites) its OK. I work w/ people from CMS daily.

Where are the disclaimers? I've clicked around, and nothing is really clear what this is, or what it isn't.

I see now. You are just a random user, you have no invite code so you don't see that landing page or any intents; just a blank record. I could def make that clearer but 99% of the traffic comes in w/ ref codes so they see the full paths w/ the disclaimers.

TY for the heads up.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#28

Post by monkmartinez »

What do you need to track? I have a personal app I call Genomicly where I am, quite amateurishly, trying to replicate MaxGen panel and similar precision medicine with whoop, and LabCorp integration. My main goal is privacy which is tricky without the right hardware. The whoop is really easy to use from someone with ADHD and 20 years on a fire engine. I need simple.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#29

Post by nusl »

ncr100 wrote: post #12
nusl wrote: post #11

I have an llm agent with a harness that stores/logs everything in a structured manner to local files and/or sqlite. This then turns more into casual conversation type stuff. Send it test results, talk about stuff, give it updates, etc, and it handles the rest. Querying the data is pretty straight-forward without the agent since it's plaintext/sqlite. I tried random tools over time but sorta fell out of them. This is…

So like a voice capture system, then just feed all that as raw data into an agent?

Is the Dune summary in your bio steganography of some sort, or contains a code? Or just as-is to avoid spoilers?

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#30

Post by noir_lord »

Considered building something like this over a decade ago (because my mum has chronic health problems that are manageable but require a lot of management) and I'd recently been diagnosed with Chrohn's.

I thought about the design/approach that would work for her and her use case and my own and then I realised I'd be holding peoples most personal data (medical) and realised that I wasn't comfortable building a system that did that or that I could keep it genuinely secure, it simply wasn't a level of risk I was comfortable with and I've worked on/around payment systems etc but that is only money in the end (and the risk would be my employers).

For my personal use case I just have health.md in my `~/personal` dir, I put stuff in with a fixed structure, so I can grep it it later and that's about it.

It seems to work however managing a chronic in illness in the UK is going to be quite different to other countries, here other than tracking your symptoms and remembering appointments (and even then there is the excellent NHS app) etc it's a lot simpler.

I wish you good luck in finding something that does work for you and hopefully others, I've yet to see a system that works for even most chronically ill people.

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