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Comment by justin_oaks | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I are still sticking with writing it down on paper. I've tried to find a proper solution as a web app or mobile app, but the ones I've tried are a pain to use.

I'm surprised that none of the mobile apps I tried will send me a notification prompting me to enter data. Instead I have to remember it myself, open the app, navigate through a few screens and finally enter a single data point. Ugh.

Instead I should be prompted to enter the data via a notification, and when I tap the notification the app should go to exactly the right place to enter the data. It should be: a notification pops up, tap notification, enter data, save. That's it.

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If you are using android phone, check Loop Habit Tracker, which is FOSS and available on F-Droid (and Google-Play, too). It is beautiful (imho) and I've been using it for years already. You can export/backup data easily, but I never cared enough to process it any further. After some initial on and off's I am really using it for keeping quite a lot of stuff like supplements, treadmill, meditation, exercise, some do's (like morning walk) and dont's (like white bread). At this point I use it with fun, systematically, not rigidly.

Edit, added link:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.isoron.uhabits/

Interesting! Was about to ask- how do you remember to log and how do you analyze the data from paper.

I have to admit the solution you describe was a pleasure to read because that is exactly what I'm building :) promotion was not my goal here but would happily share a link to the beta if you're interested.

edit: will add the link as well since your description is so on spot (other than my app uses the notifications action menu for the tracking). It's for ios and still in beta but pretty stable so feel free to sign up. would love to hear if you found it (at least potentially) useful https://www.t12n.io

The remembering to log is seeing the paper/book on the night stand when I go to bed. So it's mostly only for daily tasks. Finer grained logging doesn't happen because of the remembering and inconvenience.

The analysis hasn't been anything rigorous or long term. More eyeballing the data and checking for general trends. I'd like to be better at logging, but it's been too hard without an app to help remind and structure the data.

I tried using Google sheets or plain text on my phone, but the friction decreased my motivation to enter the data.

Got it, makes total sense. Thanks for elaborating! Would really love to hear what you think about the app I'm working on if you feel like sharing (pasted the link in previous comment https://www.t12n.io), seems very similar to what you initially described if i understood you correctly.

Yeah, it looks good, but don't have any IOS devices. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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