I put my whole life into a single database
howisfelix.today
I put my whole life into a single database
1–10 of 239 posts
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#2So it didnt end up working too well seeing that the latest data is from 4 years ago.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#3I wonder how much time you spend daily on tracking things / data entry
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#4The 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.
/edit: quantified, not qualified
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#5The 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 f…
I wouldnt have minded if I kept a simple daily journal with a photo a day. If I had that now with LLMs I could ask it "what year did xyz happen".
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#6I wonder how much time you spend daily on tracking things / data entry
Just check one of the pie charts and it'll tell you!
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#7In 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.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#8Taking “Know thyself” to a whole new level.
I’d love to have these stats on me, if it could be done by inference, rather than conscious effort.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#9Yeah, we've all put our whole lives into a single database. It's called the United States Government.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#10The 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 f…
I had a similar epiphany a few years back when I started wearing a step-tracker/sleep monitor.
It was kinda interesting to see how many times I woke up, or track hours, but to be honest I realised after a few months that when my tracker said "You had good sleep", or "You had bad sleep" I was already aware - I woke up smiling, or grumpy depending on how I'd done.
I didn't ever look at the data and think "I want to go to bed now to catch up on the four hours I missed yesterday". I continued to have mostly consistent hours, but if I was doing something interesting I'd stay awake, and if I was tired I'd go to bed earlier naturally. The graphs and data wasn't providing anything of value, or encouraging me to change my behaviour in any significant way.