There are several main reasons for me to track so many things:
- By tracking I feel like I “catch” or “keep” certain elements of my life like I would catch a fish or keep a trophy. Otherwise, I feel like my life somehow just vanishes.
- I like going back and looking at my old tracking results. I have tracked on and off my life since 2002 when I created my first FileMaker Pro database to track myself. At first I tracked my eating and exercise habits, weight and body measurements, then also sleep, menstrual cycle and yes, even poop. I just went back to look at my old EliteHRV measurements from 2015-2018 and remembered how stressed I really was in the spring of 2015, for instance.
- Tracking helps me stay on task/track and get more things done. Like I wrote in the first message to this thread, having one database where everything goes, helps me to remember at the end of the day/week/month what I’ve done, thought, listened etc. On those days when I don’t track what I do, I get much less done than on those days I track.
- Tracking helps me come aware of certain patterns and if necessary, change them. I didn’t track my eating habits and paid a little attention to my physical activity during the two years I gained weight. I thought that the weight gain was mainly hormonal – I am approaching my menopause after all.
It wasn’t until I started tracking my eating and paying attention to my energy expenditure (recorded by Oura ring and Fitbit Versa), that I realized that the main culprit for my weight gain was the drop in activity. This inactivity was caused by a couple of things, including a screenwriting project that kept me sitting by the laptop more than before that.
The good news was that my eating habits were still quite good, except that I got too little fiber, which gave me problems with pooping. So now I pay attention to my fiber intake and also poop.
- Looking at my records gives me pleasure: I have a feeling I imagine some people get when they look at their collection of shoes, cards, books (or whatever people collect).
How the act of tracking can benefit you?
when I started tracking what I do (in addition to diet etc), I didn’t have a system to do something with the data.
What has really helped me is to shift my focus from how the act of tracking/logging things helps me here and now — instead of thinking that I track/log things to do something with the data.
When I log things, I’m more aware of what I’m doing. As an ADHD person I have a tendency to “disappear” in my own thoughts and walk through my everyday life like a zombie. I get every half an hour a notification from Pushcut to log what I’m doing (if I’m now doing something else that I did half an hour ago). Also NFC tags around my house and CAR “wake me up” from my thoughts and remind me pause and think what I’m doing.
When I log my mundane tasks like emptying dishwasher, I feel like I’m gaining a point or some other reward. For a time (a couple of years ago) I actually had a FileMaker Pro/Go -system that gave me points for doing chores.
Of course it’s also useful to see your data in one place – like in my Time Management base for daily review and my Day Reports base to see longer trends etc. But that to me is just a bonus.
The other point is that If you now track data in multiple ways, you can almost always download that data later as a csv or JSON and then import in the same system.
To me the easiest way to import large csv-files to Airtable is to open the file first in Apple Numbers, manipulate the data if needed (like replace commas with points or remove unnecessary columns of data) and then just copy the table from the Numbers and paste it straight to Airtable. It works in my experience better than importing CSV straight to Airtable and much better than trying to do the same thing with MS Excel.