9 ms·

Ask HN: What metrics do you pay attention to?

115 points by DerekBickerton 5y ago

People love their metrics. Whether it's how many steps they made in a day, or their karma score on Hackernews, etc But social media metrics aside: what other metrics do you pay attention to in your daily life? One obvious one for many people would be their bottom line / profit margin. But that aside, what numbers do you pay attention to each day?

mbesto 5y ago
Love this question! For me personally: - Whoop Recovery % / Cals burned - Number of hours working out per week - Calories per day (not tracked well) - Monthly business revenue / number of projects completed - Net worth
david_allison 5y ago
- GitHub contributions - Aim for at least one per day. If not, then I should have a reason for it. - Weight (MyFitnessPal) - on a cut right now, and I'll log progress when it decreases - Time in VR/calories burned (aiming for 40 mins/250 cals minimum, but typically do significantly more) - COVID - I'm high risk for a while, so I do a daily LFD - Donations received on Open Collective
moneywoes 5y ago
I don't currently but I have read that HRV is very important.
bravetraveler 5y ago
My inbox count, otherwise - I try to minimize this! Growing up, it was nearly an obsession in my household. I realized this lead to a certain amount of stress and my attempt to combat this is - 'let things be' (to an extent). I can't help but obsess about sleep, and time spent in meetings. Things that tend to have a negative side, rather than positive.
davidw 5y ago
The weather.
hammock 5y ago
Bedtime. One rep maxes. Internal thermometer of the sheet pan meals I make every other day. Podcast revenue. Amount of dirty laundry in the hamper.
yehudalouis 5y ago
The number of times that I use nicotine. I'm drawing down from constant use, and now reserve it just for a small treat before bed. I hope to soon cut nicotine out entirely. The percentage of the week that I make it to the gym. My goal is 4x (M-Th). I like to hit my goal. Aside: if anyone has felt their mental health slip or having trouble sleeping - absolute start going to the gym. The affect it has had on my life cannot be understated.
- WaffleIronMaker 5y ago
  Good luck on your journey!
- polishdude20 5y ago
  I've been lifting weights in and off over the past year and I've definitely noticed that my mood is better and more consistent in the weeks that I lift.
cdiamand 5y ago
From my business life I'm looking at the MRR of my project https://topstonks.com https://topstonks.com, our site traffic, etc. From my personal life - I guess stepping on the scale in the mornings, haha. That's a depressing one to watch. There are the obvious personal finance metrics as well. Also keeping an eye on inflation... maybe Covid infection numbers as well since those seem to be in the news alot. It's kind of hard not to see those numbers lately.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, what’s the business model for the project?
DizzyDoo 5y ago
I'm an indie game developer on Steam and one of the most important business metrics for me is Wishlist Count. When I have a game coming up to release I can see what the level of interest is for it, and roughly how that will convert to sales. When a game is released that you have on your wishlist, Steam emails you about it, so it's a pretty valuable thing to have as a developer. It's not a metric with 100% certainty, but if you tell me you have 1000 wishlisters, or 10,000, or 100,000 I can tell you roughly the range of sales that gets you.
- mulmen 5y ago
  What do you do with this information? Do you create multiple MVP games and then complete development based on wish list metrics?
  - DizzyDoo 5y ago
    I mostly use it to say "oh good, there will probably (with a certain % likelihood) be x,000 people who will buy the game within the first week. I know publishers like Playway do exactly what you describe with all of their <insert niche job here> Simulator series of games, but it's not my thing. I use my wishlist counts to check I'm on the right track, to keep encouraged when development feels like a grind, to help justify putting a certain amount of $$ towards its development. If I was really struggling to get wishlists I would seriously consider changing the game's presentation substantially, or changing to work to something else, but I've not yet been in that situation. But in that case it would be a pretty decent signal that something about how the game looks isn't chiming with potential customers. There are other useful metrics too, how many YouTube views did the announcement trailer get? Did it get posted to reddit and do okay there? How many people have joined the Discord? And so on and on, so it's not all one thing. Given the not-perfect-but-pretty-good correlation between number-of-wishlists to number-of-first-year-sales it's a helpful number to help budget/forecast my business.
    - lardolan 5y ago
      I can imagine many points where this kind of signals will lead to distorted results. (e.g. video goes viral because of other thing than your game). Do you have also experience when it went wrong? How did you handled it?
dominotw 5y ago
number of steps on apple health pomodoro count
lambic 5y ago
>= 25km walked on Pokemon Go / week <= $70(summer)/$100(winter) Electricity consumption / quarter >= 1 book chapter / day >= 1 time leaving the apartment / day income - expenses > 0
mindvirus 5y ago
In no particular order: Number of steps (10k/day goal) Number of cups of coffee (going for the high score here) Bedtime/wake up time (need 7 hrs) Time spent focused on kids (want an hour of dedicated time with them on weekends, not including meals and taking them to/from school). Portfolio balance (working toward escape velocity). Hours studying language (targeting 1 hr/day). Alcoholic drinks per day/week (try to stay under 2/day, 4/week).
- newtwilly 5y ago
  Does high score cups of coffee seem to work out well for you?
  - mindvirus 5y ago
    Hah, seems ok. Really I have 2-3 cups a day. I tried stopping for a month once and really didn't feel great the whole time.
whelton 5y ago
Here are a handful of personal ones for me: - Health & Well-being: Step count (Apple Watch). Weight (Withings Scale). Meditation minutes. Sleep (Whoop). First sunlight exposure (circadian entrainment). Lunch and dinner times (circadian entrainment). Water consumption. - Work: Time spent on Conjure. Time spent on client work. - Self Development: Books read. Time spent reading. Time spent consuming inspiring material (mindset). I mostly track them manually or automatically in Conjure[1] (disclaimer I'm building it) and then link them to Habits and Objectives in it. I also tend to add and remove different measures/metrics at different times based on what is going on in my life, or pause certain ones for a while if I'm burnt out and need less overhead in my day-to-day. [1] https://conjure.so/ https://conjure.so/
pawelwentpawel 5y ago
Personal: - Tracking hours / quality of sleep (with the SleepCycle app) - Weights I lift in compound exercises like bench press or deadlift (pen + paper). It's motivating to see progress. - General daily well being on a scale from 1-10 (google doc). This is divided into my perceived productivity and mood. I seem to be quite erratic with tracking this recently though - I might build a simple app with reminders to help me. The scores I collect can be easily looked up in relation with my other notes (todo lists, basic journal etc.) to find what affects me the most. - Budgeting (revolut) Business: Background - I'm working on an app to make online meetings more fun. At the core I have rooms where guests can hang out and engage in different activities. The metrics I focus most for now are: - Monthly unique guests that join any kind of room as my guiding metric. - Currently experimenting with total aggregated human time spent in the rooms daily / weekly / monthly. This seems to be a better metric because in contrast with a plain MAU it also indicates engagement and general impact (would love some feedback on that - for more context on the app: https://flat.social https://flat.social). - Conversion rates from different call to actions spread across various subpages. - Core user journey funnels to see where new users get stuck so I can clean up any confusing areas of the app out (copy, buttons, navigation etc.)
- elil17 5y ago
  I would love a simple well being tracker. If you made that app would absolutely pay for it.
  - pawelwentpawel 5y ago
    I'm bookmarking your comment for the future beta testing :)
    - davereid 5y ago
      I've always used Daylio for mood tracking. You may find it useful :) https://daylio.net/ https://daylio.net/
    - chdjeudnxb 5y ago
      I made one that emails you at night time, asks how your day went, then click a few boxes on what you are tracking. I can send you the repo if you are interested.
itsmemattchung 5y ago
Lately, I've been spending a lot of time reviewing my metrics, both personal and professional. I realized that many of the metrics fell into the category of lag measures (e.g. pounds lost per month). Now, I'm trying to pepper my goals with more lead measures (e.g. number of times I hit the gym per week), wanting a mix of both types of metrics. Same applies for running my business. Instead of focusing all my efforts on revenue, I'm keeping a close eye on metrics in my control (e.g. number of people I touched base with this week)
city41 5y ago
I track sleep and exercise with an Oura ring and also track my investments. I also try to consume about 64 oz of water per day. To flip this around, I stopped tracking HN and reddit upvotes and really all social media "likes" of any kind. I mostly did this by closing all my accounts (except HN and reddit). I also removed all analytics from all of my side projects. I have found this has shifted my creation process from "what will get me likes?" to "what do I really want to make?" and that's been very positive.
francisofascii 5y ago
- Running Mileage on Strava. (have a goal of 2K for the year) - Winnings/Losses $ each week on FanDuel/DraftKings - MPGe while driving with a Prius Prime
hef19898 5y ago
Personally? None, I have already to many of those at work. Single exception: mpg for my 1982 Range Rover V8, because of reasons. Professionally? Right now not enough of those needed and to much of pointless ones. I try to get people to use the proper KPIs for what they are doing so, it seems to be quite an uphill battle. Because who really cares when POs are placed as long as they are delivered on time (which nobody is monitoring right now...)?
buybackoff 5y ago
Garmin Watch body battery. Was skeptical initially, but am surprised how well it works. It's a composite of sleep quality for gains (should recharge daily above 80 ideally) and physical stress, measured by heart rate variation, for losses. Quasi-related to the body battery is minimal heart rate while sleeping (the watches automatic "resting" number is often higher, so I look at the chart). Relative to 2-week moving average it's a leading indicator of illness. I have nice charts for my recent covid and common cold, 1-2 days before the symptoms I could see unexplained (e.g. no drinks) higher levels. In absolute terms it correlates with endurance training and recovery after long training sessions (it goes lower with training in general, after a long session it is higher for 1-3 days, when it's back to low level it's full recovery, good time for further training). Both help in simple decisions such as go to bed earlier, training intensity, whether evening coding session could be productive or better watch a movie, etc. As a side note, it's funny how alcohol affects both metrics - same as illness + very low battery the next day. The metrics make me think twice and when both are bad it's better to skip drinking even if the context/schedule and subjective feelings are OK for it.
- pc86 5y ago
  I have a whoop and the recovery metric it tracks (which is a 0-100 number of what seems to be 5-6 parameters in the current version and 8-9 in the upcoming one) is surprisingly good. I too was very skeptical of a single-dimension value but even when I don't have a "reason" to get tired early in the day it's still a good indicator of how the day is going to go.
- kevinmgranger 5y ago
  I've been unable to get my garmin to track my sleep properly. It has strange ideas about when I fall asleep or when I wake up. Do you have any advice for how to improve that?
  - buybackoff 5y ago
    A tighter, but still comfortable, fit. Also I changed the hand on which I wear it overnight. It used to show BS sometimes before the change. I think it depends on the bed and sleep posture. I do not care about sleep phases or when the watches think I fall asleep, it's approximately correct and that's enough. Hours of sleep mean much less than the body battery increase overnight.
jonathanbentz 5y ago
Personal: - Time spent reading daily: my min goal is 30 minutes. - Time spent on social media: trying to lower this to as close to 0 as possible, currently limiting to about 20 minutes per day. - Amount of sleep Professional: - Average ranking position for all keyword targets (I'm an SEO/digital marketer) - Amount of work hours invested (I'm a remoter, so I want to make sure I hit AT LEAST 8). PS - this is never a problem LOL.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  PS?
  - jonathanbentz 5y ago
    Just meant that as a post script. Sorry for the confusion.
uniformlyrandom 5y ago
I have come down to one metric in the end - sleep time (tracking with sleep++ on apple watch). The rest of the metrics lost meaning to me - they fluctuate too much depending on the weather / schedule / other factors. They also do not affect me as much as sleep.
deleted 5y ago
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DrNuke 5y ago
- Happiness time: how long I can stay happy (or content, at least) through a single day. Before this turns rough, philosophical or greedy… it is just related to pretty basic fulfillment of a pretty modest life.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  >- Happiness time >What metrics do you pay attention to? About the same. Reading only the headline, I expected business metrics not personal and jotted down the following. It really turned out more personal than anything. To the extent that I'm working with equipment or material, am I getting a good amount of performance compared to what can be expected within the reasonable range? Is the cost appropriate for the performance? Same with the people. Am I getting a good amount of value creation or invoiceable activity overall? Once again within the reasonable range. Same with the clients. Am I giving them their money's worth in ways that sustain or grow operations? Everyone needs to be enthusiastically capable and involved in pushing the client satisfaction level to the upper end of what's reasonable and keeping it there. Not only to remain within striking distance of the occasional unreasonable requirement. Everyone needs to be smiling enough for you to hear it in their voice, and the equipment if any needs to be humming along nicely.
reaperducer 5y ago
- Local COVID positivity rate - Total value of my investments and savings - Time spent sleeping At this time, there is very little else in my life that requires me to change my routine.
klausjensen 5y ago
For ~10 years I have been doing what I call my "Daily Score". It is basically me reflecting and self-evaluating my day in 6 categories, that are the most relevant to me: - Sleep - Diet - Exercise - Execution (how well did I did what I should be doing) - Mood - Social (how much did I socialize, spend time with loved ones etc) The value is: - During the day I might consider: "what would it take to end this day on a 3 in Diet", for example - When I enter the values for a day, I reflect over what went well/wrong - which can help me improve Every morning, I get an email with a reminder to fill in my Daily Score for the previous day. It takes 30-60 seconds - sometimes a bit more, if it sets off a chain of thoughts. It started out a spreadsheet, then I built a simple web-app for it about a year ago. I often thought about sharing it, but doubt it makes sense without a lot of explanation about the value being in the self-reflection - not the data.
- donclark 5y ago
  Is your web-app for public use? I am curious to learn more and/or to use it.
  - klausjensen 5y ago
    I am afraid not. I think the explanations required around the process/reflection makes it too difficult to "market" - so I have put it off.
- muzani 5y ago
  Have you learned anything interesting or unexpected? I try this for a few weeks at a time then stop because the only thing I've learned is that tracking myself makes all the metrics slip. But I assume that after several months, you'll get some reliable data.
  - klausjensen 5y ago
    Biggest lesson has been that the effect of tracking has led to positive improvements, because of the awarenes it creates. Honestly - the data analysis and looking back - has taught me pretty very little I did not already know. Yes, I can observe that some metrics almost always align, because exercising makes me more aware of my diet (not wanting to "waste" the effort made at the gym) - and that my mood and productivity are closely aligned as well. I wish I could say I gained some big insight from looking back at the data, but really it is mostly jsut about the forced reflection here and now.
osigurdson 5y ago
Strava training calendar/log. Strava freshness and fitness (though I know it is mostly bogus).
AnonHP 5y ago
I use an Apple Watch and the Health app on the iPhone to track health related metrics. Every morning, I check and track: * Sleep duration * Blood pressure * Body weight (and BMI) Everyday I track: * Water intake * Exercise duration, active calories burned and “stand hours” (these are the rings to close on Fitness on Apple Watch/iPhone) I also take a look at the following, though not every single day: * Heart rate variability (HRV) * Two-lead ECG measurement * Resting heart rate I don’t use the trends feature in the Health app. It doesn’t seem that prominent or useful.
- reilly3000 5y ago
  How do you track water intake?
  - AnonHP 5y ago
    I use an app called WaterMinder (it’s free, with a tipping option) that’s available for iPhone and Apple Watch. Whenever I drink some water (or water containing beverage), I just tap the app complication on the watch face and the appropriate water intake icon. You can configure different buttons/water volumes for a single-tap ease of use. Or you can tap on “Other” and then choose the kind of beverage and volume. The app also has some adjustments on hydration percentages for different beverages (for example, if you drink black coffee, it will take 90% of the volume as water intake). You can even edit those values if you wish. I track only the water I consume in beverages (including plain water), and don’t try to estimate the water contained in solid or cooked foods.
hobr 5y ago
Watts/kg output when cycling. On 1min, 5min, 20min and 60 minute windows. This is the only one I think that I _obsess_ over. I keep rough track on my weight, but mostly over a quarterly scale and mostly as a big input to my W/kg!
dcardoza 5y ago
What I currently track: - Hours of sleep per day - Calories burned per day - Calorie intake per day - Caffeine per day (mg) - Financial Portfolio performance every few days - Monthly spend on different categories (eg. food, housing, misc) - Squat, bench, deadlift numbers What I want to track: - Water per day - Blood levels. I'd love to get bloodwork done very 6months to a year? - Books read (mostly so I read more) - Blogposts written - Code written? Whether its a personal project, random scripts, leetcode puzzles. Helps me realize if I'm doing what I want vs. spending my time elsewhere. Definitely more I want to track. Love seeing everyone else's ideas.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Is there a personal utility to reading more arbitrarily, or do you have specific titles you're trying to get through? Do you find that these numbers are representative of what you actually want, or what you think you should want to spend your time on? What do you spend your time on for fun (not tracked)? I used to try and read a lot of my Pocket saved articles, but now have a different relationship with that. I find that I couldn't give two shits about any of the blog posts I've saved, and actually that it takes time away from things I'd rather do, like stare blankly at a wall or play video games. That's goes especially for something I ostensibly should inform myself of for a vague sense of self-improvement, but actually most knowledge is kind of a hollow pursuit unless I tie it to something.
- stagger87 5y ago
  I track water by carrying around a large nalgene. Easy to remember to drink 2 full nalgenes than 8 cups of water.
xboxnolifes 5y ago
Things I think about and physically log: - Investments (monthly) - Estimated monthly budget Things I think about and mentally log: - Actual monthly spending - Caffeine intake - Hours of sleep
d_burfoot 5y ago
I track more than a dozen quantities related to my daily activities, included alcohol/junk food consumption, exercise, weight training numbers, finance info (net worth/spending), book notes, project commitments, TODO list, language learning, and so on. I built a simple web framework that makes it very easy to add new mini-webapps (I call them WebWidgets). It turns out it is very easy to build simple webapps if the data size is modest, there is a small number of users, and you can assume the users have newish browsers. I create dynamic pages without any frontend libraries like React, just by composing HTML strings in Javascript and slapping them into div/span tags. Works like a charm. For many years this was only a personal project, but I'm slowly opening the system up for use by other people. I offer free accounts and tech support for early adopters, and I will even code up a few widgets for you if you're interested. Check it out: https://webwidgets.io/ https://webwidgets.io/
tofukid 5y ago
Weight lifted for barbell overhead press, squat, bench press, row, and pull-up.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Net worth.
shime 5y ago
The only metric I currently pay attention to is the readiness score from my Oura ring. It's interesting to see how much alcohol, eating just before sleeping or stress affects this score. And it's also nice to get the confirmation on how well I'm feeling from a tool that measures it.

mbesto 5y ago

Love this question! For me personally: - Whoop Recovery % / Cals burned - Number of hours working out per week - Calories per day (not tracked well) - Monthly business revenue / number of projects completed - Net worth

david_allison 5y ago

- GitHub contributions - Aim for at least one per day. If not, then I should have a reason for it. - Weight (MyFitnessPal) - on a cut right now, and I'll log progress when it decreases - Time in VR/calories burned (aiming for 40 mins/250 cals minimum, but typically do significantly more) - COVID - I'm high risk for a while, so I do a daily LFD - Donations received on Open Collective

moneywoes 5y ago

I don't currently but I have read that HRV is very important.

bravetraveler 5y ago

My inbox count, otherwise - I try to minimize this! Growing up, it was nearly an obsession in my household. I realized this lead to a certain amount of stress and my attempt to combat this is - 'let things be' (to an extent). I can't help but obsess about sleep, and time spent in meetings. Things that tend to have a negative side, rather than positive.

davidw 5y ago

The weather.

hammock 5y ago

Bedtime. One rep maxes. Internal thermometer of the sheet pan meals I make every other day. Podcast revenue. Amount of dirty laundry in the hamper.

yehudalouis 5y ago

The number of times that I use nicotine. I'm drawing down from constant use, and now reserve it just for a small treat before bed. I hope to soon cut nicotine out entirely. The percentage of the week that I make it to the gym. My goal is 4x (M-Th). I like to hit my goal. Aside: if anyone has felt their mental health slip or having trouble sleeping - absolute start going to the gym. The affect it has had on my life cannot be understated.

WaffleIronMaker 5y ago
Good luck on your journey!
polishdude20 5y ago
I've been lifting weights in and off over the past year and I've definitely noticed that my mood is better and more consistent in the weeks that I lift.

cdiamand 5y ago

From my business life I'm looking at the MRR of my project https://topstonks.com https://topstonks.com, our site traffic, etc. From my personal life - I guess stepping on the scale in the mornings, haha. That's a depressing one to watch. There are the obvious personal finance metrics as well. Also keeping an eye on inflation... maybe Covid infection numbers as well since those seem to be in the news alot. It's kind of hard not to see those numbers lately.

moneywoes 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what’s the business model for the project?

DizzyDoo 5y ago

I'm an indie game developer on Steam and one of the most important business metrics for me is Wishlist Count. When I have a game coming up to release I can see what the level of interest is for it, and roughly how that will convert to sales. When a game is released that you have on your wishlist, Steam emails you about it, so it's a pretty valuable thing to have as a developer. It's not a metric with 100% certainty, but if you tell me you have 1000 wishlisters, or 10,000, or 100,000 I can tell you roughly the range of sales that gets you.

mulmen 5y ago
What do you do with this information? Do you create multiple MVP games and then complete development based on wish list metrics?
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  I mostly use it to say "oh good, there will probably (with a certain % likelihood) be x,000 people who will buy the game within the first week. I know publishers like Playway do exactly what you describe with all of their <insert niche job here> Simulator series of games, but it's not my thing. I use my wishlist counts to check I'm on the right track, to keep encouraged when development feels like a grind, to help justify putting a certain amount of $$ towards its development. If I was really struggling to get wishlists I would seriously consider changing the game's presentation substantially, or changing to work to something else, but I've not yet been in that situation. But in that case it would be a pretty decent signal that something about how the game looks isn't chiming with potential customers. There are other useful metrics too, how many YouTube views did the announcement trailer get? Did it get posted to reddit and do okay there? How many people have joined the Discord? And so on and on, so it's not all one thing. Given the not-perfect-but-pretty-good correlation between number-of-wishlists to number-of-first-year-sales it's a helpful number to help budget/forecast my business.
  - lardolan 5y ago
    I can imagine many points where this kind of signals will lead to distorted results. (e.g. video goes viral because of other thing than your game). Do you have also experience when it went wrong? How did you handled it?

dominotw 5y ago

number of steps on apple health pomodoro count

lambic 5y ago

>= 25km walked on Pokemon Go / week <= $70(summer)/$100(winter) Electricity consumption / quarter >= 1 book chapter / day >= 1 time leaving the apartment / day income - expenses > 0

mindvirus 5y ago

In no particular order: Number of steps (10k/day goal) Number of cups of coffee (going for the high score here) Bedtime/wake up time (need 7 hrs) Time spent focused on kids (want an hour of dedicated time with them on weekends, not including meals and taking them to/from school). Portfolio balance (working toward escape velocity). Hours studying language (targeting 1 hr/day). Alcoholic drinks per day/week (try to stay under 2/day, 4/week).

newtwilly 5y ago
Does high score cups of coffee seem to work out well for you?
- mindvirus 5y ago
  Hah, seems ok. Really I have 2-3 cups a day. I tried stopping for a month once and really didn't feel great the whole time.

whelton 5y ago

Here are a handful of personal ones for me: - Health & Well-being: Step count (Apple Watch). Weight (Withings Scale). Meditation minutes. Sleep (Whoop). First sunlight exposure (circadian entrainment). Lunch and dinner times (circadian entrainment). Water consumption. - Work: Time spent on Conjure. Time spent on client work. - Self Development: Books read. Time spent reading. Time spent consuming inspiring material (mindset). I mostly track them manually or automatically in Conjure[1] (disclaimer I'm building it) and then link them to Habits and Objectives in it. I also tend to add and remove different measures/metrics at different times based on what is going on in my life, or pause certain ones for a while if I'm burnt out and need less overhead in my day-to-day. [1] https://conjure.so/ https://conjure.so/

pawelwentpawel 5y ago

Personal: - Tracking hours / quality of sleep (with the SleepCycle app) - Weights I lift in compound exercises like bench press or deadlift (pen + paper). It's motivating to see progress. - General daily well being on a scale from 1-10 (google doc). This is divided into my perceived productivity and mood. I seem to be quite erratic with tracking this recently though - I might build a simple app with reminders to help me. The scores I collect can be easily looked up in relation with my other notes (todo lists, basic journal etc.) to find what affects me the most. - Budgeting (revolut) Business: Background - I'm working on an app to make online meetings more fun. At the core I have rooms where guests can hang out and engage in different activities. The metrics I focus most for now are: - Monthly unique guests that join any kind of room as my guiding metric. - Currently experimenting with total aggregated human time spent in the rooms daily / weekly / monthly. This seems to be a better metric because in contrast with a plain MAU it also indicates engagement and general impact (would love some feedback on that - for more context on the app: https://flat.social https://flat.social). - Conversion rates from different call to actions spread across various subpages. - Core user journey funnels to see where new users get stuck so I can clean up any confusing areas of the app out (copy, buttons, navigation etc.)

elil17 5y ago
I would love a simple well being tracker. If you made that app would absolutely pay for it.
- pawelwentpawel 5y ago
  I'm bookmarking your comment for the future beta testing :)
  - davereid 5y ago
    I've always used Daylio for mood tracking. You may find it useful :) https://daylio.net/ https://daylio.net/
  - chdjeudnxb 5y ago
    I made one that emails you at night time, asks how your day went, then click a few boxes on what you are tracking. I can send you the repo if you are interested.

itsmemattchung 5y ago

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time reviewing my metrics, both personal and professional. I realized that many of the metrics fell into the category of lag measures (e.g. pounds lost per month). Now, I'm trying to pepper my goals with more lead measures (e.g. number of times I hit the gym per week), wanting a mix of both types of metrics. Same applies for running my business. Instead of focusing all my efforts on revenue, I'm keeping a close eye on metrics in my control (e.g. number of people I touched base with this week)

city41 5y ago

I track sleep and exercise with an Oura ring and also track my investments. I also try to consume about 64 oz of water per day. To flip this around, I stopped tracking HN and reddit upvotes and really all social media "likes" of any kind. I mostly did this by closing all my accounts (except HN and reddit). I also removed all analytics from all of my side projects. I have found this has shifted my creation process from "what will get me likes?" to "what do I really want to make?" and that's been very positive.

francisofascii 5y ago

- Running Mileage on Strava. (have a goal of 2K for the year) - Winnings/Losses $ each week on FanDuel/DraftKings - MPGe while driving with a Prius Prime

hef19898 5y ago

Personally? None, I have already to many of those at work. Single exception: mpg for my 1982 Range Rover V8, because of reasons. Professionally? Right now not enough of those needed and to much of pointless ones. I try to get people to use the proper KPIs for what they are doing so, it seems to be quite an uphill battle. Because who really cares when POs are placed as long as they are delivered on time (which nobody is monitoring right now...)?

buybackoff 5y ago

Garmin Watch body battery. Was skeptical initially, but am surprised how well it works. It's a composite of sleep quality for gains (should recharge daily above 80 ideally) and physical stress, measured by heart rate variation, for losses. Quasi-related to the body battery is minimal heart rate while sleeping (the watches automatic "resting" number is often higher, so I look at the chart). Relative to 2-week moving average it's a leading indicator of illness. I have nice charts for my recent covid and common cold, 1-2 days before the symptoms I could see unexplained (e.g. no drinks) higher levels. In absolute terms it correlates with endurance training and recovery after long training sessions (it goes lower with training in general, after a long session it is higher for 1-3 days, when it's back to low level it's full recovery, good time for further training). Both help in simple decisions such as go to bed earlier, training intensity, whether evening coding session could be productive or better watch a movie, etc. As a side note, it's funny how alcohol affects both metrics - same as illness + very low battery the next day. The metrics make me think twice and when both are bad it's better to skip drinking even if the context/schedule and subjective feelings are OK for it.

pc86 5y ago
I have a whoop and the recovery metric it tracks (which is a 0-100 number of what seems to be 5-6 parameters in the current version and 8-9 in the upcoming one) is surprisingly good. I too was very skeptical of a single-dimension value but even when I don't have a "reason" to get tired early in the day it's still a good indicator of how the day is going to go.
kevinmgranger 5y ago
I've been unable to get my garmin to track my sleep properly. It has strange ideas about when I fall asleep or when I wake up. Do you have any advice for how to improve that?
- buybackoff 5y ago
  A tighter, but still comfortable, fit. Also I changed the hand on which I wear it overnight. It used to show BS sometimes before the change. I think it depends on the bed and sleep posture. I do not care about sleep phases or when the watches think I fall asleep, it's approximately correct and that's enough. Hours of sleep mean much less than the body battery increase overnight.

jonathanbentz 5y ago

Personal: - Time spent reading daily: my min goal is 30 minutes. - Time spent on social media: trying to lower this to as close to 0 as possible, currently limiting to about 20 minutes per day. - Amount of sleep Professional: - Average ranking position for all keyword targets (I'm an SEO/digital marketer) - Amount of work hours invested (I'm a remoter, so I want to make sure I hit AT LEAST 8). PS - this is never a problem LOL.

moneywoes 5y ago
PS?
- jonathanbentz 5y ago
  Just meant that as a post script. Sorry for the confusion.

uniformlyrandom 5y ago

I have come down to one metric in the end - sleep time (tracking with sleep++ on apple watch). The rest of the metrics lost meaning to me - they fluctuate too much depending on the weather / schedule / other factors. They also do not affect me as much as sleep.

deleted 5y ago

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DrNuke 5y ago

- Happiness time: how long I can stay happy (or content, at least) through a single day. Before this turns rough, philosophical or greedy… it is just related to pretty basic fulfillment of a pretty modest life.

fuzzfactor 5y ago
>- Happiness time >What metrics do you pay attention to? About the same. Reading only the headline, I expected business metrics not personal and jotted down the following. It really turned out more personal than anything. To the extent that I'm working with equipment or material, am I getting a good amount of performance compared to what can be expected within the reasonable range? Is the cost appropriate for the performance? Same with the people. Am I getting a good amount of value creation or invoiceable activity overall? Once again within the reasonable range. Same with the clients. Am I giving them their money's worth in ways that sustain or grow operations? Everyone needs to be enthusiastically capable and involved in pushing the client satisfaction level to the upper end of what's reasonable and keeping it there. Not only to remain within striking distance of the occasional unreasonable requirement. Everyone needs to be smiling enough for you to hear it in their voice, and the equipment if any needs to be humming along nicely.

reaperducer 5y ago

- Local COVID positivity rate - Total value of my investments and savings - Time spent sleeping At this time, there is very little else in my life that requires me to change my routine.

klausjensen 5y ago

For ~10 years I have been doing what I call my "Daily Score". It is basically me reflecting and self-evaluating my day in 6 categories, that are the most relevant to me: - Sleep - Diet - Exercise - Execution (how well did I did what I should be doing) - Mood - Social (how much did I socialize, spend time with loved ones etc) The value is: - During the day I might consider: "what would it take to end this day on a 3 in Diet", for example - When I enter the values for a day, I reflect over what went well/wrong - which can help me improve Every morning, I get an email with a reminder to fill in my Daily Score for the previous day. It takes 30-60 seconds - sometimes a bit more, if it sets off a chain of thoughts. It started out a spreadsheet, then I built a simple web-app for it about a year ago. I often thought about sharing it, but doubt it makes sense without a lot of explanation about the value being in the self-reflection - not the data.

donclark 5y ago
Is your web-app for public use? I am curious to learn more and/or to use it.
- klausjensen 5y ago
  I am afraid not. I think the explanations required around the process/reflection makes it too difficult to "market" - so I have put it off.
muzani 5y ago
Have you learned anything interesting or unexpected? I try this for a few weeks at a time then stop because the only thing I've learned is that tracking myself makes all the metrics slip. But I assume that after several months, you'll get some reliable data.
- klausjensen 5y ago
  Biggest lesson has been that the effect of tracking has led to positive improvements, because of the awarenes it creates. Honestly - the data analysis and looking back - has taught me pretty very little I did not already know. Yes, I can observe that some metrics almost always align, because exercising makes me more aware of my diet (not wanting to "waste" the effort made at the gym) - and that my mood and productivity are closely aligned as well. I wish I could say I gained some big insight from looking back at the data, but really it is mostly jsut about the forced reflection here and now.

osigurdson 5y ago

Strava training calendar/log. Strava freshness and fitness (though I know it is mostly bogus).

AnonHP 5y ago

I use an Apple Watch and the Health app on the iPhone to track health related metrics. Every morning, I check and track: * Sleep duration * Blood pressure * Body weight (and BMI) Everyday I track: * Water intake * Exercise duration, active calories burned and “stand hours” (these are the rings to close on Fitness on Apple Watch/iPhone) I also take a look at the following, though not every single day: * Heart rate variability (HRV) * Two-lead ECG measurement * Resting heart rate I don’t use the trends feature in the Health app. It doesn’t seem that prominent or useful.

reilly3000 5y ago
How do you track water intake?
- AnonHP 5y ago
  I use an app called WaterMinder (it’s free, with a tipping option) that’s available for iPhone and Apple Watch. Whenever I drink some water (or water containing beverage), I just tap the app complication on the watch face and the appropriate water intake icon. You can configure different buttons/water volumes for a single-tap ease of use. Or you can tap on “Other” and then choose the kind of beverage and volume. The app also has some adjustments on hydration percentages for different beverages (for example, if you drink black coffee, it will take 90% of the volume as water intake). You can even edit those values if you wish. I track only the water I consume in beverages (including plain water), and don’t try to estimate the water contained in solid or cooked foods.

hobr 5y ago

Watts/kg output when cycling. On 1min, 5min, 20min and 60 minute windows. This is the only one I think that I _obsess_ over. I keep rough track on my weight, but mostly over a quarterly scale and mostly as a big input to my W/kg!

dcardoza 5y ago

What I currently track: - Hours of sleep per day - Calories burned per day - Calorie intake per day - Caffeine per day (mg) - Financial Portfolio performance every few days - Monthly spend on different categories (eg. food, housing, misc) - Squat, bench, deadlift numbers What I want to track: - Water per day - Blood levels. I'd love to get bloodwork done very 6months to a year? - Books read (mostly so I read more) - Blogposts written - Code written? Whether its a personal project, random scripts, leetcode puzzles. Helps me realize if I'm doing what I want vs. spending my time elsewhere. Definitely more I want to track. Love seeing everyone else's ideas.

brailsafe 5y ago
Is there a personal utility to reading more arbitrarily, or do you have specific titles you're trying to get through? Do you find that these numbers are representative of what you actually want, or what you think you should want to spend your time on? What do you spend your time on for fun (not tracked)? I used to try and read a lot of my Pocket saved articles, but now have a different relationship with that. I find that I couldn't give two shits about any of the blog posts I've saved, and actually that it takes time away from things I'd rather do, like stare blankly at a wall or play video games. That's goes especially for something I ostensibly should inform myself of for a vague sense of self-improvement, but actually most knowledge is kind of a hollow pursuit unless I tie it to something.
stagger87 5y ago
I track water by carrying around a large nalgene. Easy to remember to drink 2 full nalgenes than 8 cups of water.

xboxnolifes 5y ago

Things I think about and physically log: - Investments (monthly) - Estimated monthly budget Things I think about and mentally log: - Actual monthly spending - Caffeine intake - Hours of sleep

d_burfoot 5y ago

I track more than a dozen quantities related to my daily activities, included alcohol/junk food consumption, exercise, weight training numbers, finance info (net worth/spending), book notes, project commitments, TODO list, language learning, and so on. I built a simple web framework that makes it very easy to add new mini-webapps (I call them WebWidgets). It turns out it is very easy to build simple webapps if the data size is modest, there is a small number of users, and you can assume the users have newish browsers. I create dynamic pages without any frontend libraries like React, just by composing HTML strings in Javascript and slapping them into div/span tags. Works like a charm. For many years this was only a personal project, but I'm slowly opening the system up for use by other people. I offer free accounts and tech support for early adopters, and I will even code up a few widgets for you if you're interested. Check it out: https://webwidgets.io/ https://webwidgets.io/

tofukid 5y ago

Weight lifted for barbell overhead press, squat, bench press, row, and pull-up.

systemvoltage 5y ago

Net worth.

shime 5y ago

The only metric I currently pay attention to is the readiness score from my Oura ring. It's interesting to see how much alcohol, eating just before sleeping or stress affects this score. And it's also nice to get the confirmation on how well I'm feeling from a tool that measures it.