5 ms·

The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable: > Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the siz

• behehebd 7mo ago
  I wouldnt have minded if I kept a simple daily journal with a photo a day. If I had that now with LLMs I could ask it "what year did xyz happen".
  • nemo1618 7mo ago
    yep, I do a simple version of this in Google Sheets. Very useful to be able to "Ctrl-F" your life, especially when combined with Google Maps location history.
• stevekemp 7mo ago
  I had a similar epiphany a few years back when I started wearing a step-tracker/sleep monitor. It was kinda interesting to see how many times I woke up, or track hours, but to be honest I realised after a few months that when my tracker said "You had good sleep", or "You had bad sleep" I was already aware - I woke up smiling, or grumpy depending on how I'd done. I didn't ever look at the data and think "I want to go to bed now to catch up on the four hours I missed yesterday". I continued to have mostly consistent hours, but if I was doing something interesting I'd stay awake, and if I was tired I'd go to bed earlier naturally. The graphs and data wasn't providing anything of value, or encouraging me to change my behaviour in any significant way.
  • oldandboring 7mo ago
    Same. I had a Garmin for about 6 months and I eventually just stopped wearing it and sold it. Knowing how many steps I took today, checking it several times a day to see if I was meeting my goal, knowing how many vertical feet I skied.. none of this data ended up meaning anything to me.
    • piva00 7mo ago
      The best use I got from my Apple Watch was to use the companion app of my gym routine tracker (to track current loads and personal best) and play music so I didn't have to bring the phone to the gym. That was it, I got extremely annoyed by notifications so over time just disabled them. Also for some reason the heart rate monitor glitched a couple times, got alerts about my BPM at 180+ while I was sitting on the couch. Eventually I just stopped using it and now sits in some drawer.
  • koliber 7mo ago
    Being aware, and being aware that you are aware are very similar things that are subtly different. I was aware that alcohol affects your next day, even a little. That's because people always say that alcohol is bad for you (surprise surprise). I heard this, so you could say that I was aware. I generally thought about this as "a hangover is bad for you." and was somewhat dismissive of the "even a single drink has a bad effect" mantra. I did some experimenting, and slowly realized that even a single drink can indeed have an impact on the next day. It's not a hangover, but an impact that I could feel nonetheless. I needed to do some light stats and a lot more journaling to build this awareness. I am now aware that I am aware.
    • andsoitis 7mo ago
      > an impact that I could feel nonetheless. I needed to do some light stats and a lot more journaling to build this awareness. If you could feel it why beed the stats?
      • sdwr 7mo ago
• cyanydeez 7mo ago
  The whole "this is a movement" thing might be more about mental health issues than anything else.
• noemit 7mo ago
  A counter example: I've been wearing an Apple Watch for close to 10 years. I've tracked my weight as well along those years but nothing crazy like OP. The Apple watch tracked plenty. I had some strange symptoms and two doctors insisted I had a weak heart and potential heart failure. This was shocking! Turns out I do have a really "weak" rhythm, but heart failure is when your heart is progressively getting worse in it's pumping. I don't even remember which metric he looked at in my Apple health - but basically my heart has always been this way. A doctor looking at a single data point might think I have abnormally low blood pressure/heart rate, but if I've had this for 10 years with no change, the medical assessment is very different - it means nothing. Sometimes boring data is exactly what you need. For this reason, I will probably always wear an Apple watch (or equivalent) moving forward. Data can feel useless for 10 years until one day it becomes critical. The benefit is spiky and uneven.
  • nkrisc 7mo ago
    But you didn’t spend hundreds of hours on it, so when it did happen to be useful it seemed like an outsized benefit. I would wager that for most people, most data about themselves will be useless and not worth collecting. Of course you can’t know what data will be useless or not, so unless the cost of collecting it is minimal or nil (wearing a smart watch, writing down your weight each day/week), it’s probably not worth it. Spending hundreds of hours to build a solution to capture all data about yourself to find interesting patterns has a huge assumption baked into it: that there are interesting patterns to find.
    • cj 7mo ago
      Like anything else, I think it comes down to having a good use case. I've gotten deep into weightlifting/bodybuilding over the past couple of years, and that's the kind of hobby where micro-optimizations and data tracking can have a pretty big impact on results (and sort of necessary, you can't fly blind with things like diet, especially) E.g. I track and weigh everything I eat, take body measuraments on a weekly basis, Dexa scans every few months, etc - for me it's worth it because I know what I want to do with the data. If I didn't have a goal, all that tracking would clearly be overkill.
• swarnie 7mo ago
  This is disappointing.... Last year i noticed large chunks of my life were being monitored via many spreadsheets and i endeavoured to bring them all together in to one Oracle DB. My plan was to eventually put some ui and graphing on top very similar to OP but seeing this is making me think twice.
• alexfoo 7mo ago
  Sometimes it's the journey not the destination. I did something similar to pull data from my Garmin watch. This meant writing all manner of code to pull data out of FIT files (interesting and often infuriating self-describing file format), coming up with schemas to hold that data to make it queryable, adding visualisations, performing analysis, pattern matching, etc. The end result is nothing really useful, I had a bunch of scripts that semi-automated some jobs that would have taken 1 minute to do manually and only ever needed to be done a max of five times a day, but I learned a load of things along the way. Often these were useful lessons that can be applied to many other things when developing software. In a similar vein I've gone to lots of trouble to build a cooling system for my homelab rack (ESP32 to control PWM fans, Dallas 1-wire for reading temp/humidity, exposing measurements as metrics for scraping/observability, designing things to deal with the different voltages involved, etc). I could have just gone and bought an off-the-shelf solution from AC Infinity and installed it in minutes but where would the fun in that be.
• vidarh 7mo ago
  For me it's about managing ADHD-like (never diagnosed, and I don't care to assume) patterns, coupled with self-accountability. I have a self-improving dashboard (it kicks off Claude to propose additions based my positive/negative feedback on past attempts, and then builds them) that feels quite helpful. E.g. one of the things it added was fitbit integration that shoves my step count and resting heart rate in my face every day, and it's helped me drive my step count back up towards where I want it to be. I do think it's not worth spending a whole lot of time on, though - hence why the first thing I did was add that mechanism to have Claude build it for me, with me mostly glancing at a plan and saying yes/no. It's the perfect thing to vibe-code - if it breaks, I revert a commit and it doesn't matter because nobody depends on it but me.
  • andout_ 7mo ago
    It's important to tell the readers how long you've been doing this - especially to those that also manage ADHD or ADHD-like symptoms. Why? Because those individuals tend to spin something up, tell everyone about it (online, and offline) and then stop doing it few days later. The result then ends up being a false signal for others in the same boat. People who read it, feel a spark of recognition ("someone like me actually figured this out"), and then invest real time, energy, maybe money, into replicating something the author themselves quietly abandoned two weeks later. Just a small heads up from someone who used to get burned in the past :)
    • vidarh 7mo ago
      I have data going back many years, but this recent effort is a few months old at this point. It's however notably an iteration that has reduced the amount of time I spend on collating and reviewing data, by automating away most of my previous manual effort, including most of the coding, and so I do suspect I'll stick with this for a very long time. A significant part of the prompt to the Claude part of it is to focus a substantial portion of plans on how to automate little things that costs me time, and it's doing a decent job at that. I've absolutely not figured it out, but I now have an agent throwing stuff at the wall (with guidance from read access to e.g. my journal and a few other data sources) to figure it out for me, and it's gotten steadily better.
• coffeefirst 7mo ago
  Yep. Same goes for elaborate note-taking and productivity systems. The simpler, the less bookkeeping and cognitive overhead, the better.
• nicbou 7mo ago
  I have built a much more limited version of this that combines my journals, sketches, photos, geolocation etc. I found it useful for noticing patterns in my behaviour and in my irrationality. Journaling helped the most, because recording my feelings means acknowledging them and reviewing them. Above all, it's just interesting. I enjoy reading about the day-by-day progression of a crush or my brutally honest feelings about a trip that produced stunning pictures. It weaves nuance into my history.
  • andsoitis 7mo ago
    Yours is qualitatively different because you’re not quantifying your life. A good thing.
• a3w 7mo ago
  *quantified self
• Noaidi 7mo ago
  If you are not sick, tracking your life like this is, like he said, is useless. Enjoy your life! On the other hand, if you are sick like me, charting your long term heath data from doctors visits and photographing skin issues can lead to great discoveries. I have been diagnosed with Erythrocytosis and a susceptibility to mycobacteria infection which caused pulmonary nodules and skin lesions. Only after showing my data collection to my doctor. Since I have mental illness they constantly over looked my physical issues so I needed hard data to convince them of my ideas. For those curious, I have an minor IL12B deficiency and a partial immune deficiency leading to mildly elevated levels of DexoyATP which is partially corrected with zinc supplements.
• fxwin 7mo ago
  extensive tracking of self-related metrics to improve ones health is the equivalent to reading tons of self-help books to improve ones life/social skills/... We already mostly know what makes people happy/healthy: personal connections, physical activity, healthy diet and some sort of purpose/goal in life that goes beyond day-to-day activities. The problem is that these things generally require (hard) work and can be unpleasant sometimes, so humans do what humans do and spend unreasonable amounts of time doing the more pleasant things such as reading and gathering info rather than applying these and what they already know. (That's not to say that a project like this can't be fun or lead to insights, especially across longer time spans, but i feel like all of the questions in the first paragraph have fairly obvious answers if you know yourself at all, that don't require extensive tracking of stats to get)
• Bullhorn9268 7mo ago
  I too learned this the hard way. I still haven't figured out why this is the case - like, is the inherent incidental irreducible complexity of human life too high, so it dominates majority of our actions?
• flexagoon 7mo ago
  > The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else. Quantified Self, at least in the intended form, is focused on testing specific theories, not on collecting large amounts of data and trying to find something interesting in them. See, for example: https://gwern.net/zeo/zeo#what-qs-is-not-just-data-gathering https://gwern.net/zeo/zeo#what-qs-is-not-just-data-gathering
• angiolillo 7mo ago
  > it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project. I agree with this but minimizing the cost changes the ROI. Personally, I've discovered useful insights tracking various life metrics. But I also found quickly diminishing returns after a few weeks or months -- if an association isn't obvious within that timeframe it's either too much effort to isolate or too slow or small to matter. At various points I've tracked calories, macronutrients, weight, allergens, supplements, sleep, exercise volume, exercise timing, nighttime screen use, spending/budget, air quality, and mood. Now I know what kind of cooking wrecks the air quality in my house, what foods I don't digest well, what various protein/carb/fat ratios look like on my plate, how much effort it takes to improve fitness, that exercise in the morning or early afternoon improves my sleep while exercise in the evening harms it, and that any alcohol or caffeine wreck my sleep while screens at night have no measurable effect. But once I understand the associations I can alter my behavior and move on. > The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else. I would agree that continuing to track metrics every day long after they've stopped yielding new insights is often compulsive behavior. But I think that's an argument for time-boxing experiments, not necessarily avoiding them altogether.
• matusp 7mo ago
  It's pure armchair psychology, but this type of project always makes me think about anxiety. Who really needs this level of self observation and control? At the same time, I really enjoy reading about it and I find the window into somebody else's world intriguing.
  • efilife 7mo ago
    > Who really needs this level of self observation and control I liked doing similar things in the past. There's no anxiety in the equation, just pure curiosity. How many times have I done a thing a month/year? I was always curious about stuff like this, much like the OP. There's also the hacker spirit in play - designing the apps for tracking stuff.
• ericyd 7mo ago
  Cynical take: I didn't need to read to the bottom to know it was useless to track the correlation between drinking alcohol and dancing
• aurmc 7mo ago
  I ended up doing something similar to this project a year or so ago: for nearly an entire year, I tracked every single thing I ate or drank. Who knows how many hours I spent scanning nutritional facts on the backs of boxes, estimating amounts of liquids, and even tracking sips of water. And weighing myself! Thank goodness I used a "smart" scale at least, and I didn't have to worry about carefully inputting my weight to an app each time. But the whole project was an exercise in perfectionism. "I have to remember this sandwich and log it the next time I'm alone" made me anxious, but once I logged it, I felt a sense of completion. The database and my personal history are now at nirvana. Everything is complete. All for me to learn things every human alive knows today: eat more food and you'll gain weight; eat less food and you'll lose weight. Yes, I can now tell you the exact average difference in calories I'll eat, statistically speaking, on a day that I have adderall in the morning vs a day that I don't. Yes, there's a similar (but much smaller) difference in average calories per day if I have caffeine in the morning as well. And I can tell you that I generally eat an additional 200-400 calories per day on a Fri-Sun than on a Mon-Thu. Wow, groundbreaking. I've always had a lot of water, but matching foodanddrink.csv to my HealthKit data showed that I have more water on days that I walk more steps. Mildly interesting to see it written out for me? I guess. But was it worth cataloguing every cup of water? Absolutely not. Was any of [gestures broadly at me pulling out my phone and cataloguing each item I ate] necessary to learn that? Of course not. It gave me a chance to look back at the database and say "Wowee! I did that! Every day for a year, wow, I'm so cool!" and not much else.
• cobertos 7mo ago
  > however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project. Trying to extrapolate this conclusion to the entire "quantified self" movement is not correct. The issue is the time cost, not the act itself. If a trusted company came along (as if...) that sucked up this much data to allow you to answer these questions with minimal effort, I'm sure this would be a different story. Anything at the fringes of tech with no tried and true solution requires hundreds of hours of effort. The author's conclusions are also personal, there are other styles of living and conclusions to be drawn that change the calculus on whether to do it or not.
• BloondAndDoom 7mo ago
  Agreed, I have tendency to do this to “fix” something in my life, after doing it for 2 weeks I already know, just the consciously pay attention to something even without recording make it very obvious what’s going on.
• driverdan 7mo ago
  I never spent as much time as OP on this but I did collect a lot of data during peak quantified self. I liked having automatic data collection and being able to see trends, for example. I stopped because of a few issues, not related to time: * Hardware companies went out of business, stopped supporting devices, etc. It became obvious that there was no long term commitment to make good quality hardware that lasted a long time. * Many devices and/or data collection was consolidated big, data hungry companies Google and Apple. Competitors have similar anti-consumer uses of data. I don't want any of these companies to have my data. * Related to the last one, limited to no offline or local only data collection. It is very hard to gather most of this data with off the shelf hardware and keep your data private.
  • skyberrys 7mo ago
    This provides some insight into startup ideas around privacy, local first, offline only self data collection. I agree this kind of personal life data is something you don't want to contribute unknowingly to big data. I could see wanting to share it particularly around a health problem where only massive compute has a chance at providing answers.
• runjake 7mo ago
  You're equating two different things here: "building a custom web application" with "quantified self". These are two entirely different things. Felix's statement isn't a condemnation of quantified self. I think that sometimes, when you're applying algorithms that aren't well-studied, you get pointless or bogus data. I feel much this way about sleep tracking algorithms from the likes of Apple and Whoop. Vitals, too, although it seems remarkably good at detecting when I'm about to get sick. As a person in the older demographic of HN, having an Apple Watch quietly collect useful data over years and store it in a database has been immensely useful in helping resolve medical issues. I used to really be into QS, and if I'm training for a marathon, I'm still studying graphs and drawing conclusions. I'm still into QS, but now I just silently log data to Apple Health and use it for medical histories or to identify certain trends (vo2max, cardio fitness, blood pressure, etc) a couple times a year.
• WarcrimeActual 7mo ago
  This whole site is a rich persons humblebrag. That renders all of it moot as far as value.
• PurpleRamen 7mo ago
  I kinda disagree. Doing something about open questions which are bothering you can be valuable in itself, even if the result of the process is useless in the end. And usually you are also learning some valuable things along the way, or just push your life into a necessary direction. That isn't related to OCD or perfectionism, it's just gaining more control and insight about some aspects of your life.
  • brodo 7mo ago
    > it's just gaining more control Yes it is! And if you control everything, you won‘t make mistakes.
• visarga 7mo ago
  I did something similar - I put 18 years of comments on reddit, HN, slashdot, and 3 years of LLM chats in the system. I ended with a similar conclusion - it was less useful than I expected. My intent was to do RAG over my corpus, have a LLM get direct access to what I commented over the years, but unfortunately this much information has a negative effect on LLM creativity. Its responses started to fall in line too much with my ideas and it lost its spark. In the end my conclusion was that all that data was facing towards the past while I desire LLMs to improve in the other temporal direction.
  • arjie 7mo ago
    I did the same but with GPT embeddings. My primary problem was different though. I wanted to find when I talked about a related subject somewhere. Search works really well.
• jives 7mo ago
  > The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else. As someone who has dealt with OCD and perfectionism, I think that could be the case for a lot of people. And the urge to obsessively track everything can be debilitating.
• coldtea 7mo ago
  One interesting actionable takeaway fact is that if you do such a project spending so much time on it, your life outside of it likely sucks.
• karlitooo 7mo ago
  Having set up Analytics on all my websites, I noticed absolutely zero change in sales volume therefore Analytics is a waste of time.