· 3 min read

Developing better self-awareness with QuantifiedSelf - Observability for personal life.

Why do you need to have personal metrics? And how can they help you make informed decisions and stay on the path?

What do I mean by the Observability of personal life?

Quantified self means tracking certain things in our life so that we can make good decisions.

These decisions are made so that we can course-correct them if we are straining away from something important.

And therefore, it would make us more self-aware.

Why do we need it?

In our fast-paced world, we take on too many things at once. We are constantly distracted by attention-seeking entities like marketing companies.

In this, we forget the take care of the most important person we know. Us.

Ideally, the problem lies in just taking care of ourselves enough. But it’s way more helpful to have proactive systems in place. So that we are guided towards taking care of ourselves. Therefore, this article.

What can we do to implement it?

Before implementation details, it’s important to determine a few factors first.

  1. The goal is to make more informed decisions. The goal is not to distract us.
  2. We must live a balanced life: healthy, wealthy and wise. Or you could say, healthier, wealthier and wiser. All aspects, not just one.

Therefore, each day may not be perfect. And we need certain randomness in place for the best decision to happen.

Being too perfect will lead to anxiety. And as we already know: #PanicIsNoGood (Zeus from Thor: Love and Thunder).

Here are some I tried to implement:

Track your healthy

Check your weight over time

Need not be perfect every day and can be random, just over time. Being too perfect is good for the short term when u want to improve something, but not good for the long term as it leads to anxiety.

Regularly get preventative body checkups

Once a year or once every two years.

Number of times you went to the gym

Cult Fit App

Track your time

Life cycle app: Automated

Shows how much time you spent and where.

Lifecycle

Source

Screentime: Automated

Phones do come with apps that make you more aware of the time you have spent.

Screentime1 Screentime2

Chrome Extensions: MindHero: Automated

Tracks time spent on websites.

Mind Hero

MindHero - Chrome Web Store

Programming:

WakaTime - Dashboards for developers

Waka Time

GitHub Streaks

GitHub Streaks

Source

Be mindful of how much time you spend attentive with family

Family is the most important part of life.

Track your memories

Photographs

Diary writing

Personal diary to write down thoughts and other entries.

Track your money

CRED App

In India, CRED app gives accurate summary of credit card info.

CRED

Track your writing

Grammarly

Grammarly also publishes a weekly email with insights about your writing. It also suggests improvements that can be made.

Grammarly1

Grammarly2

Making decisions

Don’t check the data every day.

Most apps allow for useful prompts and summaries that can be used.

What are the limitations?

//TODO

Resources

Quantified Self: You have the data, now what? - YouTube


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