Comment by amalgamated_inc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amalgamated_inc | Hacker News Reader

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amalgamated_inc

I've got a pretty complex system that's evolved over time. I'd say my meta-system is that I track everything with simple command line scripts, which makes this system super flexible and adaptive.

E.g. I can type:

    today wake 8:30

to record that I woke up at 8:30am today. Similar for other stats. All this gets saved in a simple JSON file.

I then have a bunch of scripts on the backend that can read the JSON file, display it in column form, graph it, dissect it, and so on.

For example, I can do

    series annotate wght -f annotate:Low-carb -t annotate:"End Low-carb" | graph

to display all the annotation (these are the major life events/trials) and weight data from the beginning of a low-carb data to the end, and display them in a nice graph.

I think the problem with off-the-shelf solutions here is that these aren't flexible enough. E.g. at one point I went through and compared major life events to see if any of them had caused changes in my sleep patterns or weight. At the time I recorded the data (almost a decade now) I hadn't even thought of this, but it was very easy to build the functionality in later to match my current needs.

> I think the problem with off-the-shelf solutions here is that these aren't flexible enough.

Too true. I am using ready-made Loop Habit Tracker on Android (mentioned in another comment), but I am slowly moving to track things inside Obsidian, which is free-form Markdown editor. Using Obsidian's Dataview plugin makes it really simple and has this advantage of being absolutely flexible that you mention is important. Doing it freehand inside Obsidian (with some prefilled templates and Dataview plugin) makes it really close to your CLI solution in terms of flexibility. Still, your solution sounds cool. :)

Wow super cool, advanced(!) system.

Do you always remember to log? Do (or did) you consider that a hassle?

I haven't checked, but don't think I've missed a single day in almost a decade. It's basically the first thing I do when I sit down at the computer in the morning. I'm sure there are a handful of exceptions where I was on a 18h flight or something :D

My thought is: if I have to force myself or keep forgetting it, the system isn't working. So if I was constantly forgetting to log, I'd find some way to make the system more accessible/remind me. But I don't have that problem.

At one point I was tracking 6+ daily things, most of them completely unimportant, and I realized this was making me be less diligent, largely because it felt like most of the values didn't matter at all. So I stopped tracking factors I don't consider important and consider them "mental clutter."

Impressive! And super interesting, thank you for sharing!

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