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Morning writing on 750words.com Morning writing on 750words.com Apps for tracking my health Apps for tracking my health

It’s the beginning of summer and a good time to reflect a bit on what I’m recording every day with various devices, apps, and sites. I first did an inventory of My Tracking Toolkit last year in February and I’m still using a lot of the apps there. The prompt for this update is from starting to use Mike Lazer-Walker’s caffeine-tracking app Cortado as it made me think about the uses that other people have for the data that I’m generating. What made me want to use Cortado was a blog post by Lazer-Walker about why you shouldn’t trust him. There is a whole bunch of data out there and it’s valuable.

For me the value is in being able to check back on what I’ve been doing and to remember things. In looking back at my other post about this, it didn’t list everything I was using, but that’s ok as there is so much stuff around and some things drop out of the rotation while others stay. The random tracking that I do is via the Reporter app which collects data through a questionnaire that pops up throughout the day. It’s flexible and powerful and always with me.

One site for collecting and analyzing my data is Zenobase, which is Eric Jain’s service that allows you to record, import, analyze, and visualize data. While I’ve been using it for a while and have set up a bunch of data sources, I haven’t dove in to explore the full potential of it, but I’m glad there is a place for my data. The other site where I track a lot of stuff and that I still use several times a day is Nathan Yau’s Your Flowing Data, which is my backup for recording films, coffee, beer, bike rides, and weight. A lot of the health data also goes into Apple Health either automatically or using the Sync Solver app on my phone.

Maybe a good way to go through what I track is to think about a typical day and the tracking that happens as it progresses. The data is almost always shared somewhere else too, so I have a few IFTTT recipes that work with Craig Eley’s Sifttter script that assembles a lot of this into a daily summary added to my Day One journal along with the data that goes into Zenobase.

Questions in Reporter Questions in Reporter

Starting when I wake up I set the Reporter app to awake and make my first question of the day which is how well I slept. Then I stop the timer on my Fitbit One which recorded my sleep. It also records my steps and I will hop on the Wii Fit and weigh myself (I still don’t have a smart scale) and add the weight into the Fitbit app on my iPhone (and send it via Twitter DM to Your Flowing Data using Drafts). I do some stretches and mediate (with the Stop Breathe & Think app) and check those activities along with a few others using Coach.me.

Coffee and oatmeal are breakfast most days and I record the caffeine with Cortado along with an entry to Your Flowing Data for the coffee and oatmeal with Drafts. Then I start recording the water I drink and food I eat with Lifesum on my iPhone. Lifesum has been great for me and it has helped me control my weight by allowing me to track what I eat. I have a Gold membership which allows me to link my Fitbit data, so it keeps track of my activity to be able to adjust the calories available. The nutritional and calorie information is also shared with Apple Health, so I have all that data there too.

If I go for a bike ride I’ll track the ride using Cyclemeter which uses GPS from my phone, a Wahoo Blue SC Speed and Cadence sensor, and a Polar H7 heart rate monitor to track my ride data. After my ride it automatically shares data with Strava and I’ll use Drafts to record the kms ridden onto Your Flowing Data. Right now I don’t have a mount for my phone or a bicycle computer so I don’t see the data as I ride, which is good. Sometimes I’ll wear the Polar FT4 watch which shows me my heart rate and the time elapsed, and I prefer to be minimalist and simple while riding.

When I’m out and about I’ll check in to locations using Swarm from Foursquare which goes to Sifttter and Zenobase. If I have something to eat or drink goes to Lifesum and Cortado (for coffee). When I spend money I track that with Next (which I just started using) and it’s been working well for me to keep track of spending. The steps I take go to my Fitbit and more passively with the Human app which reminds me to move if I sit for too long and does a great job at recording when I’m moving in a vehicle or walking.

When I watch a film I record it on Letterboxd (I usually tweet about it with the Letterboxd link to let people know what I am watching). I also record how I watched the film (theatre, DVD, online service) using Your Flowing Data with a DM sent from Drafts. I also have a question in reporter about what I watched that shows up in my final report. If I’m reading a book (either in print or on my iPad) I’ll record that using Goodreads (which gets collected through Sifttter too).

If I listen to music or podcasts during the day I’ll record those when the question What did you listen to?” shows up in Reporter and iTunes songs show up thanks to Last FM using the Audioscrobbler plugin. The Last FM data goes to Sifttter and Zenobase as well. But I don’t manually record individual songs or podcasts if I listen to more than one episode. I also don’t record tv shows (except for in my answer for What did you watch?” in Reporter in the final report for the day).

Finally before going to sleep I’ll click on the Sleep button in Reporter and answer about what I watched and listened to. Then I start the timer on my Fitbit to track my sleep and I go to sleep before starting the whole cycle again the next morning.

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