How to collect data from your life?
By: Emrecan Arık
Tags: Health, Productivity, Growth Mindset, Personal Development, Data

How to collect data from your life?

A beginner’s guide to personal data

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

1. Decide what’s important to you in your life

Before start collecting data from your life you should decide why do you want to do it? Do you want to be more productive? Healthier? Happier? Pick one or a couple of areas in your life that you want to improve. But be careful about picking too many fields to track. You should only collect the data that you can process. The key is going steady and slow, not moving fast, and giving up early.

What gets measured gets improved. — Peter Drucker

After you decide why do you want to collect data and choose some areas to focus on, it is time to identify the data fields to collect. Let’s say want to focus on health, some data fields to collect can be like this:

Exercised (true/false)

Steps

Calorie intake (kcal)

Sleep time (hours)

Weight (kg)

Or maybe you want to track how productive you are during the week, month, or year. In this situation areas to focus on can be listed as:

Focused time (minutes)

Checked to-do list items (integer)

Your own productivity score for the day (out of 10)

Main mission (true/false) → Every morning I ask myself “If I could only do one thing today, what should I do?” That’s my main mission for that day. You can do this weekly or monthly but I found out that daily missions work the best..

These are just basic examples you can collect data from every part of your life if you think that is adding some kind of value to your life. Some people track phone screen times, their moods by the weather, their commutes, or -you probably know how popular this is- their Spotify history. You can see other types of tracking ideas in this great post.

Since 2013, I have been collecting how many times I sneezed in a year. It started as a misunderstanding, I was supposed to count my blessings in life but I didn’t know that has another meaning. It started like that and now it is my icebreaker story. You can see the silly graph below.

2. Collect data regularly

We are only at the stage of collecting the data from our lives. The matter of what we are going to do with the data we collected is another subject for another post. However, before doing anything with it we have to make sure it is collected properly and regularly. Consistency is very important here. If you only log data when you are feeling dull or only when you are super productive, results will not give a clear vision about your life.

Every day it gets easier but you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier. — Jogging Baboon, Bojack Horseman

Try to make a habit of manual data entry. Maybe you can include this in your morning/night routine. Take a cup of hot beverage and dedicate just 5 minutes a day. Create a recurring task at your to-do list app. Use the “Don’t Break the Chain” method. If daily logging is too frequent for you, maybe try weekly. Do whatever works for you to do it regularly, trust me you are going to thank yourself.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Until this point, we mostly talked about manual data logging but you also try to be as regular as possible with automatic data collection. You may think how can automatic data entry be irregular, the answer is because of you. For example, let’s say you are tracking your sleep, you have to make sure that you have your smartwatch or phone battery is enough to stay on until morning. Or you might be tracking the places you have been over the year, are you sure that you allowed Google Maps to track your location all the time? It is little things like that you should keep an eye on.

But no matter how hard you try, sometimes life gets in the way, more important stuff comes up and you can lose the streak. Don’t feel discouraged, we are only human. Just try to fill the gaps as accurately as possible and continue to do what you do. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

3. Tools and systems

For all the things I listed above, you can use just a pen and paper but it is almost 2021 and there are much better ways to do it. There are two main categories here. I call them trackers and databases. Trackers are self-explanatory, tools that track data from your life both automatically and manually. Databases are where all of our data sits before we process it.

We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us. — John Culkin

Notion

Notion is my ultimate database hub and not for just data I collect, for every aspect of my life. How I use Notion as a second brain is a subject to another post but let me show you my setup for next year’s happiness and productivity tracker. I also use this as some kind of a diary.

Author’s daily template

So what do we have here? This is basically a template to measure how happy and how productive I felt that day. I like to use other fields to create reports at the end of the year. Reports like productivity by days of the week or happiness by exercised days. I also give each day a title like it was an episode from Friends. Such as The One with the Evil Orthodontist or The One With Phoebe’s Birthday Dinner. It is a dorky thing that I do to remember days in a fun way.

This might seem like a long list to keep track of every day, but it wasn’t always like this. I started tracking my mood and general wellbeing in 2016. This document has been evolving every year since then. I would like to add some external data, like health, weather, to-do list items, or financial information but it is not possible at this moment with Notion. If you want to use external information, you can use Google Sheets as a database. Google Sheets does almost everything that Notion does but unfortunately, it doesn’t look as good as Notion.

Smart watches/bands

I believe that smartwatches or smart bands are a bit of luxury items. At the moment you can live just as well without them, they are not essential items for most people, unlike a smartphone. But if you have one it can help a lot to track your life.

Photo by Angus Gray on Unsplash

Tracking Sleep

This is my favorite thing about wearable technology, a device working for you while you are sleeping. I don’t have a lot of information about how does it do that but it is great. You can check your sleep score, the average time you fall asleep at or how many times you wake up in a given night. I believe that you can use these pieces of information to make adjustments that will improve your life immensely.

Tracking Steps & Location

This is a no-brainer, this is the first objective of a smartwatch.

Easy data logging

I think removing the friction between thinking and doing is where smartwatches shine. Let’s say you are tracking the water you drink. Pulling your phone off your pocket and logging in after every glass might be a struggle but just a single tap on a screen at your wrist is almost nothing. If you are tracking a field that requires multiple manual data entries in a day, using a smartwatch can help you substantially.

Apple Health App

Health App that comes on iPhones by default is a tremendous database and tracker. I haven’t been on the Android ecosystem since 2014 but I think Google Fit is doing the same thing on Android devices. Health App can give you graphs and insights based on what you provided already. It can hold up lots of data for years without getting any slower and I think this is amazing. You can export all of your information if you would like to transfer on another app. It is very easy to use, just allow the app to do the work.

Photo by Arek Adeoye on Unsplash

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