What Should You Be Tracking in 2019?
By: Mark Koester
Tags: Self Tracking, Data Visualization, Quantified Self, Data Driven, Data Journalism

I’m strong believer in the power of the weekly review. Whether it’s weekly or monthly, the basic idea is once a week to do a bit of organizational cleanup and reflect. Think about the past week and plan for the week to come. For me, it’s period of time where you go “meta” and consider what worked and didn’t work in your processes. Iterating on this process will over time help you better understand your work and life systems and implement changes for improving your life and work.

Personally, I started doing weekly reviews several years ago, and it remains one of my most useful productive or goal-driven habits. Once a week, I set aside about 30 minutes to look at my past week, check-in on key areas and plan and set goals for the week ahead. While the format has gone through a few different iterations, I stick to doing it every Sunday, keeping it under 30 minutes and making sure at least 10 minutes of that time is dedicated to personal reflection writing.

Originally inspired by Getting Things Done, I now use a data-driven approach to my weekly reviews. First, I aggregate and log several data points using Google Form and store it into a Google Sheet. I also collect some screenshots of a few tracking areas. Second, I then do some minor cleanup and run some simple comparison formulas in the spreadsheet. Third, I generate a template with the filled in data points. Fourth and finally, I use that template to write up my own thoughts and reflect on the week past and week to come.

If I could only recommend a single weekly change for someone to try, it would be weekly reviews. It’s simpel to get started, but it can have a profound impact.

2. Create a Personal Data Dashboard

Whether it’s at a company or just for your personal needs, one of the best ways to engage with your data is by creating a data dashboard.

Here is an example of my “productivity” dashboard:

There are a lot of tools you can use to create a personal data dashboard. How it looks isn’t that important, since the main objective is to help you compare your data over time and visualize various trends. A spreadsheet app like Google Sheets or excel can also be used to visualize your tracking data, while Tableau or Google Data Studio are slightly more professional options, which can provide a way to sync with stored data.

Increasingly I’m a fan of using IFTTT or Zapier to automate my data collection into Google Sheets. I then use some simple formula functions to process that data into additional time dimensions like date, month, week and year and into useful metrics. Finally, I link that data into Google Data Studio to create interactive data visualization.

I spent a few hours building my current dashboard and have adding a few tweaks here and there as my objectives and focus changes. Admittedly, there is a slight learning curve with Google Data Studio, but it shouldn’t take more than an afternoon or two to get up and running.

If you are interested in learning how to create your personal data dashboard, I’m currently preparing a course on Google Data Studio for Personal Data Analysis and Quantified Self that will be released in early 2019. Signup for my newsletter to get early access and other goodies.

3. Goal Check-ins for Studies, Key Projects, and Experiments

Goal Tracker, built with AirTable

Goals are a complex subject. It’s a lot more fun to think about the target and content of goals rather than ponder the systems that can positively support (or negatively undermine) us in reaching them. I’ve recently started to be more conscious in setting and tracking my goals, especially since doing more research into the science of goals.

Ultimately the key to using tracking with your goals is use data and your data analysis when evaluating your goals.I keep a big list of my goals in a spreadsheet application called AirTable. I then categorize, prioritizing and schedule those goals.

For example, I follow Buffet’s recommendation of goal prioritization and have set 5 big long-term goals. My additional sub-goals or incentives are short-term goals aimed at fulfilling those big goals, like financial freedom or running a marathon under 4 hours. In view of how hard it is to work on multiple goals at the same time, I schedule these sub-goals by the month or quarter. I find this is a pretty good balance and it helps me view goals as a process, rather than a target. Specifically, I’m able to do goal setting, goal tracking and goal management all in one place.

This has proven relatively sustainable, and I use my existing tracking data along with a bit of reflection to see how I’m doing and figure out what to fix or optimize. Goals are a process and tracking helps me optimize that process.

Conclusion: What should you be tracking in 2019

Tracking and personal data remains a complicated and contentious topic, and I expect it to remain so for the coming years. One of the big reasons it remains such a hot topic is that the majority of the benefit of all of this data goes to a few technology companies. By collecting data on their users, companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and others are able to know with a high degree accuracy who their users are and how to manipulate them. This isn’t a fair balance of how data is used, since as creators and owners of that data, we should be able to benefit too.

One of my personal missions is to help people to better understand, collect and use their personal data. In this post, I shared why I think tracking data is beneficial and how it can be an enabler for better self-understanding and improving how we improve. I also shared a pretty hefty list of what I’ll be tracking in the year ahead. I don’t expect or recommend most people to track all of these areas. For one reason, it will take some time to get setup, but mostly because what you track should align with what you want to work on.

What should you be tracking in 2019?

I think there are four key areas everyone should track: health, money, time, and projects (e.g. tasks, habits, and goals).

1. Your Money or Finances

Unless you are fortunate to be born rich, I believe most people would benefit from some degree of financial literacy, planning and setting goals. Money is one of the easiest and simplest to track. Most banks and money transactions are digital, meaning it’s easy to get your data. Wealth tracking is also an area where you can easily automate many of the processes from transaction categorization to investment deductions. Tools like Mint, Personal Capital, Spendee or You Need a Budget are all great ways to get started. In terms what and how to track, I recommend tracking three aspects: your transactions, your financial check-in’s (periodic account balances) and your financial goals.

2. Your Time (or productivity)

Time is also relatively easy to track. You can use either a passive method or manual logging to record your time usage. There are advantages to both manual and passive time tracking as well as a hybrid method, which I personally use, where you passive track device usage and manually track project time. To get started with time tracking, checkout RescueTime which lets you track your computer time and categorize which sites or apps are productive vs. distracting. After logging your computer usage for awhile, check your overall numbers, decide if your allotment is what you want and implement changes to decrease or increase time in certain areas.

If you are more concerned about mobile phone usage, Android and Apple both provide apps to log your screentime and know how much time you spend on your devices. Both let you set notifications and limits too.

Arguably the hardest yet most powerful time tracking method is manual tracking. Personally, I use Toggl to log my hours but most timer tools will work. Start by tracking a single key area like writing or studies and consider expanding from there. If you want to ensure you are putting in the time on a goal, then log it.

3. Your Productive activity = Projects, Tasks, Habits, and Goals

Anything that takes more than one step is a project. Under the umbrella term of “Productive Activity,” I include projects, goals, habits, and tasks. It is my way of providing a catch all phrase about tracking and better managing any multistep initiative or activity. There are countless books and articles on productivity and how best to manage it. My main point here is to show that with tracking you can create a “scorecard” that allows you to track the regular steps you complete and overall achievements too. For example, you can use a task tracker like Todoist to know how often you complete tasks from a certain project or you can use a habit tracker like Habitica to know how often you complete a new habit and your current streak. Once you start logging the tasks you complete, you can start to gamify it by ensuring you get so many done in a day and how many high vs. low priority tasks.

4. Your Health

Of these four items, health is one of the harder ones to nail down on how best to measure and quantify. One key distinction that might useful when tracking health is whether you are measuring your health status (like blood tests, heart rate, etc.) or tracking certain health commitments (like running, drinking, water, taking vitamins, etc). You should aim to track a mix of both your health status and your healthy habit commitments.

When it comes to health status, I recommend periodically getting your blood biomarkers tested and, if you are over 35 and you’ve never checked it regularly, your blood pressure. Both will provide a good baseline. If you are overweight, you should get a scale and track that. Personally I’m fan of HRV which is a way of measuring your chronic stress and automatic nervous system. I use to see if I’m overtrained, overstressed, over-traveled, etc and make periodic adjustments to get more rest.

The thing to remember is that “healthy” and even “sick” are not simple binaries. In fact there are a multitude of parameters (like blood biomarkers) that score on ranges and scales from sick to normal to optimal and even those ranges are somewhat subjective too. That said, while you might decide on your own health numbers, when it comes to health and wellness there are a few well-established health measurements I recommend and use. The key point is to track them consistently and use health data as a feedback loop to understand if lifestyle changes are improving your health or not.

When it comes to tracking your health commitments, there are nearly countless ways you can do that. If you just need to get moving more, a wearable or pedometer step counter will work. Use it for a few days to get a baseline, then see a goal to improve. If running, swimming or another activity is your thing, track it with Strava or another app. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what you use but just try to find an easy way to get a sense of how often you move and what you are doing. Personally I find the easiest way to do this is with a Wearable. I use an Apple Watch, but I’m also a fan of Fitbit, MiBand, Garmin, and Oura Ring too.

Finally, if you are interested in collecting your tracking data and doing some data analysis to engage with that data, check out my open source project QS Ledger on github.com. It’s a collection of Python Jupyter notebooks that walks you through collecting your data and data processing to full data analysis and creating your own data visualizations.

What will you be tracking in 2019? What did I miss that you think I should try in the year ahead?