I've been using a paper-and-pen-based life tracking system for some time and have benefited a lot from it, so I decided to take some time and build it into a web app that others can use too.
Life tracking, for those of you not familiar with it, is the process of tracking things going on in your life for both analysis and improvement. For example, each day I track things related to my health such as whether or not I exercised or ran, what I ate for each meal, and whether or not I stretched at some point during the day. I also track things related to the products I'm working on such as marketing activities, a summary of what I accomplished that day and what my objectives are tomorrow.
Unlike most other life tracking tools, this system is meant to be used once at the end of each day and should take no more than a few minutes to complete. Not only do you benefit from the analysis of your daily reports, but you also benefit just by making them because it forces you to be accountable for what you're doing each day. I highly recommend trying it, if only for a week or two to see whether or not it helps in your life.
My goal from the start was to build and launch this in four weeks of nights and weekends effort; today is exactly four weeks so I'm launching despite one or two rough edges. I'm very open to feedback so if there's anything you'd like me to add or change just let me know.
I really think you should check out iDoneThis, and emulate their once a day email system. Parsing the responses would be a bit harder than what they do, but not a huge challenge.
I think when a lot of people hear the phrase life tracking they associate it with conclusions like drinking an extra half an ounce of water each meal reduced my caloric intake by 6.6% and I think that can be a bit overwhelming and it discourages people from trying it out (sounds like a lot of work!).
Stats and analysis are far less important for me than the act of tracking. Knowing that I'm accountable for my decisions makes me much more likely to make positive choices. For example, I've been trying to cut back on coffee. Knowing that I drink 1.2 or 0.8 coffees per day has far less of an impact on me than knowing that at the end of the day I'm going to have to go in and check "Yes" next to my coffee item. It sounds ridiculous, but it works.
Sebastian Marshall has written extensively about life tracking, which is how I originally got into it. His What Gets Measured Gets Managed post is an excellent primer:
"Knowing that I'm accountable for my decisions makes me much more likely to make positive choices."
I found a very similar effect when I started taking pictures of everything I ate and drank for a few weeks. My intention was to eventually write an iPhone app specifically for taking these pictures and tagging them with food items, having the phone tabulate overal nutrition information ,etc.
Turns out I never ended up having time to write that app, but what I noticed was that the simple act of taking the pictures (without ever reviewing them) was enough to force me to stop and think about what I was about to eat, and that was enough to affect a change in my diet.
The blurb from their website, and yes, it is a really useful app once you commit to actually taking the pictures:
>>Want to take real steps to improve your eating habits?
Use The Eatery to snap photos of your food. We’ll give you something much more helpful than calorie counts.
We’ll provide a big-picture breakdown of your habits, including your strengths, weaknesses, and the best places to start making a change. Other apps tell you about your food. We tell you about yourself.
This needs a mobile app to be useful to me. I started doing this with a google doc, but didn't keep at it because going to the form to fill it out was too much overhead. Instead, I've been using Task:Life on android. I wish it had a wider variety of inputs other than binary checkboxes, but it basically works. Highly recommend a mobile app for it, because getting a notification and filling it out in a few taps is basically the limit for the amount of time I'm happy regularly devoting to this.
As noted elsewhere, this system is not designed to be used as things happen. It's meant to be filled out once at the end of each day and should take no longer than a few minutes. It's supposed to be as non-intrusive as possible.
That being said, several folks have mentioned this so it's a possibility down the road, maybe.
I know. I don't record things as they happen with Task:Life either. I get a notification on my phone every morning, currently set to 7AM. I tap the notification, tap the things I remember doing on the previous day, done. It works great. My only complaints are that the fields are all binary, and the analytics it provides are lacking.
I'm not looking at my computer in the evenings, and I don't want to. Computers these days are for work. If I'm on the internet in leisure time, ~80% of the time it's on a phone. A phone app is perfect for this. A website that I have to remember about, then visit, then wait for it to load, then scroll around, is way too much overhead for me to consistently do it. That's why I abandoned the solution I had using google docs forms.
It would be nice to have an iphone app set up with an automatic reminder so it would pop up a notification everyday at 10pm asking me to fill out my form which I could do straight from the app.
2 yrs of learning: the problem to solve here is not a slightly better tool to track, but a way to track the metrics without any effort. If it requires them logging data, you'll have a straight downward usage chart.
They get super excited at the beginning to be a better person, then 2 months later fall into old habits and abandon the site.
Simple fact is we need hardware tech to monitor things transparently and without effort.
If you have any more questions let me know, I have lots of data to back this up.
Agreed that it would be nice if this kind of tracking could be automatic, but I don't think we're not at a point technology wise where that's economically feasible right now. Some sort of hybrid approach is probably the best bet right now and maybe that's something I can work towards if there's interest (like providing an API that third party developers could tie specific apps into).
Also agree that there is going to be downward usage, though I suspect that if you look at most apps usage will decrease over time. As developers, it is our challenge to discover and address the causes of the churn as best as we can, but understand that it's natural and unavoidable. Over the long run, everyone cancels.
> As developers, it is our challenge to discover and address the causes of the churn as best as we can, but understand that it's natural and unavoidable.
I disagree. I believe if whats state above is the nature of your market/customers then you are in the wrong market.
SaaS products require a healthy customer retention rate to be successful.
The analogy in our case is often the gym. At a gym:
a) 70% try it out for a month or two then cancel,
b) 25% keep paying but rarely show up,
c) 5% of customers pay and visit frequently (regulars)
A business in that situation has to either make a ton of money form each customer OR have enough new (paying) customers signing up frequently to fill both B and A - to survive.
Attempting to minimize the effects of a market with an inherently high churn rate is costly and usually not worth the effort.
I really look forward to the day when we can rely more on implicit data from users for this kind of automation. I think it will start with purpose built devices (eg Wakemate), but then evolve into more sophisticated platform type devices ready for anyone's code.
I've been thinking about this some time now and I think that the company that eventually figures this out (human self-monitoring devices) - on a full commercial scale - would be very successful and quite powerful (that medical data is valuable).
That's your problem right thar'. Data input is tedious. Eventually (most) users stop doing it and everything breaks down.
Solve this problem, and this would be a very compelling service. Until then its sort of a "great in theory, doesn't work in practice" type of tool (for most people).
I agree. Maybe send me an email in the morning that asks me a few questions and let me reply with my answers or something.
Or make a "homepage" view that I can set to my new tab screen. Each time I open a new tab I can one and only one question with dead simple entry. If there are no questions to answer, I get some stats or something.
I saw the little image with the form fields and I thought, great! Forms to fill out!
And I say this as someone who has kept spread sheets, paper ledgers, you name it.
I've been thinking about ways to solve this. I also find it tedious (I track behaviours via chains.cc). My current exploration is randomised text messages, but they can quickly pile up.
Being a good developer and being a good designer doesn't always go hand in hand.
Your project is a one month side-project. Not only does it work well, but it looks great as well.
May I ask how you did manage the design part of your project ?
Thanks -- vhf (my side projects were ugly as hell till bootstrap came, and by now I'm tired of its look. How dare you come with a one month side-project not only usable but also good-looking ! ;) )
The best way to get good at design is to practice a lot.
For example, I'd recommend not using Twitter Bootstrap until you're comfortable doing it all the hard way. It will take time when you start, but over the long run you'll be in a much better position if you know your CSS and know how to make it all look good.
On the latter point, create a favorites folder called "Well Designed" and save pages to it that appeal to you. Take a few seconds and ask yourself what about it makes it look good. Inspect elements using your browser's built in inspection tools and see what the developer did to make it look that way. Then try to do it yourself and repeat.
Definitely needs email reminders! Otherwise I doubt I'll remember coming back every day.
Maybe you could also look into embedding the form directly in the email. I know it can be done, as I've gotten emails from Google adWords after browsing their help pages. They contained a full blown form for me to fill out.
My one feature request: It'd be nice to record a time along with either yes/no, or open ended answers. For example, I'd like to track whether or not I did something, and add a timestamp along with it, maybe rounded to the nearest 15 minutes.
For now, try just getting through the first few days. After that it becomes more of a habit and you're less likely to forget. A sticky note can help too :)
I've actually been telling myself to make something like this to scratch an itch of mine for a long time. Congrats on beating me to it!
The way I envisioned it working was very similar to the way you implemented it. I'd like to make some recommendations though.
- Give the user options to start with pre-populated sections (health, learning, travel, whatever) or maybe even some generic pre-populated questions
- Instead of using a form to collect the daily report, what about a free form text field that auto-completes based on text in the questions?
The reason I say this is I imagine the way I would use this would be I have 20 or 30 long-term goals that I have but I don't want to be asked every day about all of them. I just want to type in what I did, and the "what I did" gets populated as I type. For new things that don't match an existing question, maybe they could get added to a list of "new questions" that they have to save.
Also, i'm assuming this is a feature that is coming, but ultimately I want to see which of my sections I've been avoiding and which i've been making progress on.
P.s, if you want a co-coder on this project, let me know!
Hey I am really impressed with this site. I have explored a whole bunch of sites of this kind and this looks like one of the most promising. I have considered building a site like this with the exact features I want. I will definitely have more feedback for you as I continue using the site.
I know you have emphasized how you want this to be a once a day action system. I definitely understand the desire for simplicity but I would also like the option to be able to enter certain things as they happened so they are associated with a specific time. For example it would be great to easily see that it's been X number of hours since I last did this or just data regarding what time I tend to do what. My ideal system would have a dedicated iphone app where I could optionally enter things as they happen. See all my previous data. And have a daily reminder to fill out the once a day form. I know this would be a challenge to keep it simple but I think it would be worth it. Anyways fantastic start on the site!
This is great. I've been looking for an open-ended life tracking tool like this for a while. After playing around with other services like Daytum, which ended up feeling constricting and unintuitive for what I was hoping to do, I kind of gave up. I'll be keeping a close eye on this as, after a quick once over, it looks pretty awesome. Good luck with this Matt!
This sounds great! It's exactly how I'd like to enter this sort of data – once a day, using a template, with automatic tracking.
I've signed up and I'm beginning to build my template.
One question, though: will I be able to export my data?
This is crucial not just to prevent lock-in and ensure I control my own data, but especially so that I can play around with my tracking history in e.g. Excel.
I have tension headaches often. I've been thinking of tracking for each day things like:
- Did I sleep bad and woke up with headache?
- Did I avoid driving to work because of headaches or fear of a slightly heavy head turning into a nightmare in the afternoon?
- Did I avoid driving to work because of medication?
- Did I say no to going out for beers because of headaches/medication?
- Did I work out or talking a walk?
I'm fearing I lie to myself about this. :)
Would I be shocked seeing a yearly overview with the answers to these questions?
Would I realize my quality of life is far too low?
Could I see a pattern of other things I do / don't do that causes my headaches?
Could perhaps the app calculate a number for my quality of life?
matt11 - Would your app help me do this?
HN - Any suggestion for a method / iOS / Mac / web app to do this?
I'd like to see a better input method other than straight html forms. Personally.
A guided approach ie: Did you stretch? Tap Up arrow for Yes, Down Arrow for No.
Quick keyboard input (or touch on mobile) of one question at a time might be nice. You could also skip questions with another input. Learn what questions the user values most, and show those first.
I really like this idea.. signing up now to see where you take it.
Edit: also pre filled out question templates (I dont want to start with a blank slate)
And also community contributed questions that can be voted on/gauge by popularity so I can add others questions/ideas to my own checklist.
The alternative input techniques you mention are an interesting idea. I have to give it some more thought. It will just overly complicate the interface if not done very carefully.
I love the idea about community-contributed questions. Thanks!
Just signed up and tried it out. Firstly, great work. It really show plenty of promise. Secondly, some suggestions.
1) Would love to see the yes/no question template expand to become a multiple choice questions. Eg, which colour paper did I use today? blue, red or yellow.
2) Can you have an option to export the data out, especially for the questions with numerical data? This would be use for custom analysis or reports.
3) Is it possible us to specify some limits for the quantity questions? ie, I will only accept if the answers are between 5mins and 15mins.
My first thought: way, way too much text. Really. This is an application that is absolutely screaming for a team of great designers to pour over things like http://thenounproject.com and integrate their findings directly into each 'thing' and activity that can be logged.
* No mobile client yet? I'm going to use this a lot more if I don't have to be online to do it ..
Come to think of it, I'm quite inspired by the idea of combining the above two points into a side project of my own .. ;)
Really like it! Only feedback so far is 'Create report from template' is not intuitive to me. Would something like 'Enter today's data' work better, or is there an angle here I'm missing?
Some ideas:
- An iPhone app or web interface
- Allow you to upload a photo as a response
- Some sort of API to add things like "How many emails did you send?" or "How many Twitter followers did you gain?"
- Some way to pay you... I'd hate to start using this for a few months only to see it go away
My concern with building an iPhone app or interface is that shifts the tool from being a fill out in a few minutes at the end of the day tool to a fill in stuff as it happens type tool, which is what I think discourages people from continuing with it long term. You might be interested in Daytum if this approach suites you: http://daytum.com/
As far as paying, thank you for the offer. I'm mainly looking for feedback right now; will likely charge folks down the road via some freemium model (and you all will be grandfathered in).
It looks like a nice tool. I think you need to be a bit clearer about how you intend to use people's private information. Giving you a permanent license to use my data to market your site seems like a bad deal for me. What if I get famous and you start marketing yourself as the website that made the now-famous fat guy thin?
Great job. I use pen and paper calendar for this now, tried Joe's Goals previously but it wasn't flexible enough.
Feature request: It would be awesome there was a 'calendar view' that showed the data as colored bars, like the Seinfeld 'Don't Break the Chain' concept. Then the user could click on today in the calendar and edit the report.
This is fantastic! It leaves me wondering if there could be some email tickler, or even email input ability that could keep you on the wagon, filing out your forms.
I really enjoy the summaries from 3 months ago I get from idonethis.com and I could see some similarities here.
As someone else recommended, I'll probably implement an optional email reminder system down the road. Accepting inputs via email would be very tricky though. We'll see what folks want.
I would like to see a more compact dashboard though. One screen that shows me how successful I am on all my questions (I only entered yes/no ones and probably won't use anything else, except maybe the quantity)
Chart My Self looks like it takes a lot of work; Lucid Tracker doesn't.
In all seriousness, their tool is used primarily for tracking quantifiable health-related things. You can track pretty much whatever you want with Lucid Tracker and it doesn't have to be quantifiable.
I've been using a paper-and-pen-based life tracking system for some time and have benefited a lot from it, so I decided to take some time and build it into a web app that others can use too.
Life tracking, for those of you not familiar with it, is the process of tracking things going on in your life for both analysis and improvement. For example, each day I track things related to my health such as whether or not I exercised or ran, what I ate for each meal, and whether or not I stretched at some point during the day. I also track things related to the products I'm working on such as marketing activities, a summary of what I accomplished that day and what my objectives are tomorrow.
Unlike most other life tracking tools, this system is meant to be used once at the end of each day and should take no more than a few minutes to complete. Not only do you benefit from the analysis of your daily reports, but you also benefit just by making them because it forces you to be accountable for what you're doing each day. I highly recommend trying it, if only for a week or two to see whether or not it helps in your life.
My goal from the start was to build and launch this in four weeks of nights and weekends effort; today is exactly four weeks so I'm launching despite one or two rough edges. I'm very open to feedback so if there's anything you'd like me to add or change just let me know.
Thanks for checking it out. -- Matt