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?
- Why do we need it?
- What can we do to implement it?
- Making decisions
- What are the limitations?
- Resources
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.
- The goal is to make more informed decisions. The goal is not to distract us.
- 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.
Screentime: Automated
Phones do come with apps that make you more aware of the time you have spent.
Chrome Extensions: MindHero: Automated
Tracks time spent on websites.
Programming:
WakaTime - Dashboards for developers
GitHub Streaks
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.
Track your writing
Grammarly
Grammarly also publishes a weekly email with insights about your writing. It also suggests improvements that can be made.
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