The number one question I get asked on Twitter these days is how I get the data for my media consumption posts and quantified self reports. So I thought I’d dedicate this week’s post to explain my tracking setup.
I got into self tracking in the early 2000s when I first discovered HistoryStats – a Miranda plugin that gave me interesting statistics about my messaging behavior (who I talked most often to, what words I used the most, etc). A few years later, Audioscrobbler (which is now last.fm) allowed me to get similar statistics about my music habits. I also started to keep logs of books and movies that I had read and seen.
Inspired by the work of Nicholas Felton, I later began to quantify all sorts of other activities. My 2013 Quantified Self report – my most comprehensive tracking project so far – included data such as: How much I walked, drank, ate and slept. How many people I talked to. How many buildings I entered. I even tracked how much time I spent in the shower and brushing my teeth.
At the beginning, I always carried a little notebook around with me to write down things as they happened, but over time I got into the habit of simply being more present and remembering the core activities I wanted to track, so I could digitize them later. Even activities such as reading books I now consciously quantify and memorize while I’m doing them.
I currently use an Airtable spreadsheet for the vast majority of my QS activities, which I update about once or twice a day.
My 2020 tracking sheet looks like this: I have 10 spreadsheet tabs – one for each tracking category. These include Sleep, Wellbeing, Fitness, Work, Media, Drink, Food, Social, Travel and Screen Time.
Each tab then has a variety of metrics that I update on a daily basis. This is my current structure:
Sleep 🌙
↳ Bed Time (hh:mm)
↳ Wake Up Time (hh:mm)
↳ Perceived Sleep Quality (1-5 rating)
↳ Sleep Location
↳ City (single select)
↳ Location type (single select: home/hotel/…)
↳ Nightmares (y/n)
↳ ██████ ██
Wellbeing 🙏 ↳ Perceived Happiness (1-5 rating) ↳ Perceived Stress (1-5 rating) ↳ Perceived Overall Healthiness (1-5 rating) ↳ How Worried am I About the Future? (1-5 rating) ↳ Perceived Backpain (1-10 rating) ↳ Illnesses (multi-select) ↳ ██████ ██ ↳ ███ ███
Fitness 💪 ↳ Meditation (hh:mm) ↳ Back Exercise (y/n) ↳ Stretching (y/n) ↳ Swimming ↳ Swim distance (meters) ↳ Swim time (hh:mm) ↳ Push-ups (number) ↳ Plank (duration in minutes) ↳ Other Sports ↳ Sport (single select) ↳ Duration (hh:mm)
Work 💼 ↳ Start Time (hh:mm) ↳ End Time (hh:mm) ↳ Work Type (single select: work/writing/…) ↳ Work Location (single select: home/office/coworking/…) ↳ Perceived Productivity (1-5 rating) ↳ Perceived Job Happiness (1-5 rating)
Media Consumption 📚 ↳ Kindle Books ↳ Book Title (single select) ↳ Reading Time (hh:mm) ↳ Physical Books ↳ Book Title (single select) ↳ Reading Time (hh:mm) ↳ Audio Books ↳ Book Title (single select) ↳ Reading Time (hh:mm) ↳ Podcasts ↳ Podcast Show (single select) ↳ Podcast Episode (single select) ↳ Listening Time (hh:mm) ↳ TV ↳ TV Show (single select) ↳ TV Episode (single select) ↳ Watch Time (hh:mm) ↳ Soccer ↳ Teams (multi-select) ↳ Goals (number) ↳ Watch Time (hh:mm) ↳ Movies ↳ Movie (single select) ↳ Watch Time (hh:mm) ↳ Games ↳ Game (single select) ↳ Play Time (hh:mm)
Social 👫 ↳ In-person Conversations ↳ Partner (y/n) ↳ Close Friends (y/n) ↳ Friends / Acquaintances (y/n) ↳ Co-worker (y/n) ↳ Other (y/n)
Travel 🚗 ↳ Did I use this mode of transport today? ↳ Plane (y/n) ↳ Car (y/n) ↳ Subway (y/n) ↳ Taxi (y/n) ↳ Tram (y/n) ↳ Train (y/n) ↳ Bus (y/n) ↳ Scooter (y/n) ↳ Boat (y/n) ↳ Other (y/n)
Screen Time 📱 ↳ Total Phone Screen Time (hh:mm) ↳ Time Spent in Social Apps (hh:mm) ↳ Phone Pickups (number) ↳ Notifications Received (number)
While this might sound like a lot of work, it doesn’t actually take a lot of time to fill out the sheet each day. I probably spend less than 5 minutes per day in my Airtable spreadsheet.
In addition to my tracking sheet, there are a few metrics that are calculated (semi) automatically:
Number of Articles Read Whenever I finish reading an article I add it to Pocket with a specific tag. Every article (title, URL) then automatically gets added to another Airtable spreadsheet via IFTTT.
Music Behavior Last.fm tracks every song I listen to.
Fitness and Sleep Data I have a Fitness Alta that tracks the number of steps I take and how active I am. It also tells me how long and well I slept.
Location Data I check into every single place I visit with Swarm. I also have constant location tracking turned on in Google Maps, Gyroscope and Zenly. None of these always-on services is particularly great – I really miss Moves App.
Screen Time I use Screen Time on my iPhone and RescueTime on my laptop. I wish Apple would release a Screen Time API so that I didn’t have to manually copy data from the app to Airtable.
Air Quality The Plume Flow 2 is the latest addition to my quantified self setup. This is a mobile air pollution sensor that measures Particulate Matter (PM1, PM2.5, PM10), Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and nitrous oxides (NO2).
I’m thinking about upgrading to a newer fitness tracker with a heart rate monitor or a more sophisticated sleep tracker like the Oura Ring. It would also be interesting to move to a sort of tracking bot that randomly asks me questions through-out the day (see Felix Krause’s LifeSheet or Reporter app) to avoid peak-end bias.
Eventually, I’d also like to build a dashboard that combines my Airtable spreadsheet with my yearly goals and gives me real-time reminders and statistics about my routines and habits – but this is for another article.
Kevin Kwok posted an excellent article a while back about The Arc of Collaboration. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but the main argument is that productivity and collaboration have always been handled as two separate workflows:
We started with individual files that we sent back and forth via email
Then Dropbox came along and enabled collaboration within documents, but communication about these docs remained a separate channel
Slack wants to become the central communication channel for all productivity apps
The problem, Kevin argues, is that productivity and collaboration shouldn’t be treated separately. Instead, they should go hand in hand and that’s exactly what a lot of the latest productivity tools do: Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc all have messaging natively built in to their apps.
While these functional workflows work great on their own, they are still separate silos between which you have to switch back and forth. The solution might be a meta layer on top of the productivity stack that works horizontally across all function workflows.
It’s not clear yet what exactly this meta layer would look like but it might be something similar to what Discord is to gaming.
I mostly agree with the points Kevin makes, but I see the role of Slack slightly different. While I don’t think that Slack will become the meta layer, I do think it came closer to that idea than people give it credit for.
Instead of Slack, I believe that email – and more importantly Superhuman – will return to become the center of gravity for productivity.
02 Notifications & the Multiple Inbox Problem
With more and more productivity apps creating their own messaging systems, users suddenly face a new problem: Multiple inboxes. You now have to check notifications in Github, Trello, Google Docs and half a dozen (if not more) other tools in your productivity stack.
Slack basically wants to be the unified notification center that captures all those incoming alerts from your productivity tools – a high frequency communications layer that ties everything together.
The way I see it notifications serve three important functions:
Being notified about (relevant) new developments
Taking actions on these developments (if necessary)
Building a (personalized) history of company records
As Kevin points out in his article, Slack only really handles the “being notified” part. Whenever you want to take action on notifications you have to switch to whatever app you’ve received the notification from. Productivity and collaboration remain separate.
But Slack isn’t the perfect tool to manage notifications. Incoming alerts aren’t really bundled in one place but appear across different channels and between different messages. This makes it really hard to keep track of which notifications you have seen and which you have taken action on.
You need a single notification stream that allows you to treat notifications like tasks. Slack isn’t that. But you know what is? Email!
03 Emails as To-Do’s
Back in 2013, the Mailbox team built an email client that looked more like a to-do list than an inbox. With a simple swipe users could simply mark an email as done, add to it to a list or snooze it to deal with it later. Emails became tasks.
While Mailbox eventually got deprecated (after Dropbox acquired it), the emails-as-tasks concept lives on. Snoozing emails and Inbox Zero are now standard features in most email apps.
I’ve always wondered why no one ever developed the idea further: Why stop at snoozing emails? Why not add other actions to your email inbox? Inspired by these questions, I briefly worked on an idea a while back that can be summarized as an inbox that only lets you reply with pre-defined actions.
Sounds confusing? Let’s look at a few examples.
Example A:Your colleague Lisa invites you to a meeting
→ A right swipe accepts the meeting and adds the event to your calendar ← A left swipe declines the meeting and lets you propose a different time
You never have to open the message or write a lengthy response – you can only react with a swipe.
Google Calendar notifications in Gmail are actually already pretty close to this, so let’s look at a more sophisticated example.
Example B:The New York Times notifies you about a new article they just published
○ A simple tap just opens the article ⇥ A short right swipe adds the article to Pocket → A long right swipe saves in Evernote ← A right swipe sends the article to your Kindle
The problem with this idea is that you are limited to just a handful of actions (because you can’t fit more on the screen) and that it’s difficult to predict which actions are most relevant for each message you receive.
This is where Superhuman comes in.
04 Superhuman as the center of gravity for productivity
Superhuman, for those unfamiliar with it, is an email client that – among other features – lets you manage your inbox by just using your keyboard.
There are keyboard shortcuts for literally every single command you can think of: Compose a new email? Hit c. Discard a draft? Press ⌘, Shift and b. Reply to an introduction email with a Thank You note and move the original sender to bcc? Press ⌘, Shift and i (yes, this actually exists).
Most importantly though, users can trigger a command line interface so you can just write down the action you want to take without having to remember the exact keyboard shortcut. The NLP engine behind this thing works remarkably well and understands what you want to do no matter how you phrase it (this might be Superhuman’s most underrated feature).
At the moment, Superhuman commands are limited to typical email actions (snooze, send later, etc), but the obvious next step, in my opinion, is to add commands that work across different apps.
That meeting request your colleague Lisa sent you? Instead of just sending a reply why that time she proposed doesn’t work for you, you should just be able to also send an updated calendar event without having to leave the Superhuman app.
But you should also be able to block 30 minutes in your calendar before the meeting so you can prepare – without having to switch over to your calendar app and add the events there. Hit ⌘K and type “Add 30 min buffer before event“. Done.
I suspect that Superhuman will build their own calendar features (as well as to-do list functionalities) and then start integrating third-party applications to become an actual platform.
With a strong enough NLP engine behind the command line interface, the possibilities become endless:
Add that New York Times article to your Pocket queue or send it directly to your Kindle to read it later
Re-assign Jira tickets directly from Superhuman or send them to your to-do list
Pay invoices or send money to a friend
You never have to leave the Superhuman app – the command line becomes your personal assistant that takes care of all your productivity tasks.
Side note: Opening up to 3rd-party developers and thus becoming a platform is also how you build a moat on top of an open standard like email and make the business more defensible.
05 Managing the information firehose
Once you can react to email notifications right from your inbox, you can forward all your 3rd-party notifications to your email inbox and manage them from one place. This is how you solve the multiple inbox problem we discussed earlier.
Having all notifications in one place sounds scary: People are already struggling to stay on top of their inbox today and risk missing important messages. This is where Superhuman’s Split Inbox feature comes in handy. Your main inbox is still reserved for only the most important emails you receive. For everything else you set up dedicated split inboxes.
You could set up an inbox for all your newsletters, a dedicated inbox for just your Github notifications (or any other tool) or group your emails by teams or projects.
Collecting all notifications in one place has another benefit: Building a (personalized) history of company records. In the current world of multiple inboxes your information is dispersed across a dozen different services and whenever you try looking for something you never know where to find it.
This aspect feels like a very underrated benefit of a unified notifications inbox.
06 Closing Thoughts
I’m aware that this idea isn’t really the meta-layer that Kevin outlined in his article. Email and productivity would still remain separate workflows, but Superhuman would become the center of gravity from which all other tools are being managed.
An actual meta-layer might look closer to something like Tandem, but I could also imagine a Superhuman Command Line that lives outside of the Superhuman app – similar to what Command E are building.
Publish 52 blog posts This is my number one goal for 2020. I want to start publishing quality content on a regular basis and improve my writing skills. I’ll donate €100 to charity for every week I miss.
█████ ██ ███████ ██ ███
Read 20 books
Watch less TV
Last year: 125 hours
Swim a total distance of 120km
Go for a swim at least once a week
Back exercise every second day
██████ ████ ████
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██ ████████████
Ship a redesign of this blog
Finish work on my daily uniform
Conduct a 2020 Quantified Self Project This will be my biggest QS project since 2013. I’m tracking more than 70 metrics across 10 categories this year.
Publish my 2019 Quantified Self Report before end of Jan
Build a Personal CRM system
Limit meat consumption to 24 days
No alcohol if I have to work the next day
Visit 1 country I haven’t been to before
Explore more new places 25% of my Swarm check-ins should be places I’ve never visited before
I set myself 15 goals for 2019 and completed 9 of them, which is a slightly higher success rate compared to my 2018 list (60% vs 56%).
███████ ██████ ██████ ███████ ✅
Go for a swim at least once a week ✅
Like in 2018, I didn’t miss a single week this year. My swim streak is now at 171 weeks.
Swim more than in 2018 ✅
I barely managed to achieve this goal: I swam 132km this year, compared to 129km in 2018 (+2.3% YoY)
Back exercise daily ❌
I did my back exercise training on just 29.6% of the last 365 days. My average perceived back pain increased to 2.45/5 (up from 1.45 in 2018). For 2020 I have set myself a 50% exercise goal.
██████ ███████████████████ █████ ❌
Spend less time on social media ✅
I definitely spent *at least* as much time on Twitter this year as in the year before.
Read 20 books ✅
I started reading 34 books but finished only 19 of them.
Get a Switch and play Breath of the Wild ✅
Write 50 blog posts ❌
I shipped just 25 blog posts and many of them weren’t what I would consider real articles. I’ll try to make writing a bigger priority in 2020.
Write 365 tweets ❌
Limit meat consumption to 24 meals ❌
2019 was the first year I failed to achieve my meat consumption goal ever since I started tracking this in 2012.
Limit alcohol consumption to 2 days / week ❌
I failed to hit this goal. I reduced my beer consumption by 47% YoY, but had more cocktails and glasses of wine.
Improve my cooking skills ✅
Learned how to make sourdough bread, how to brew coffee with a Chemex and perfected my Old Fashioned skills, among others.
Explore more new places ✅
I measure this in form of Swarm check-ins to locations I haven’t been to before. My 2019 goal was to make every 4th check-in a new place (25%). In the end 43% of this year’s check-ins were at new places (777 out of 1806).
Visit a country I haven’t been to before ✅
Traveled to Japan and Finland.
I switched back to an iPhone a few ago after several years being on Android. Here are a few first impressions and thoughts:
Battery life on the iPhone 11 Pro is insane. I get almost two days on a single charge compared to less than a day on my Pixel 3. This has been the most noticeable difference so far.
The iPhone camera is great but doesn’t feel like an upgrade from the Pixel. In fact, when it comes to the software part of the camera the iPhone is clearly a step back. Portrait mode looks like a poor Photoshop job in 9 out of 10 cases. I’m surprised this isn’t highlighted more in iPhone vs Pixel reviews.
Notifications on iOS are a hot mess. It’s wild that Apple still hasn’t solved this. I don’t get why they don’t simply copy Android’s notification center design?
I miss having a Google search bar on my homescreen.
I haven’t used Siri even once – but I never used the Google Assistant much either. This still feels like a solution looking for a problem.
Similarly, I was looking forward to the Shortcuts feature on iOS but have barely used it so far. Any recommendations for useful shortcuts?
The quality of (third party) iOS apps is noticeably higher than that of their Android counterparts: Less bugs, nicer animations, even features I wasn’t aware existed.
I keep on accidentally turning on the flashlight (apparently I’m not the only one). Why can’t I remove this from the lock screen or – better even – replace it with something useful (e.g. notes)? The lack of customizability on iOS is frustrating.
Another example of this: Why can’t I freely arrange icons on my home screen the way I want to? (some on top of the screen, some on the bottom, for example)
Thinking about it, it’s pretty crazy that the design of home screens (or desktops) hasn’t really changed since the 90s. This is an area where Windows Phone was really onto something.
I was happy to see that pre-installed apps on iOS are finally deletable … until I realized that deleting apps doesn’t actually mean you get rid of them. You are permanently locked into a variety of Apple services that are vastly inferior to 3rd-party apps.
Why can’t I replace Apple Maps with Google Maps in 3rd party apps?
Why is it not possible to use another assistant but Siri?
Why am I not able to make back ups with Drive instead of iCloud?
Why do iPhones still have physical mute buttons? Feels unnecessary.
The Screen Time statistics feel better designed than Google’s Digital Wellbeing app. I wish Apple would make it harder to keep using apps which have reached their daily time limit though.
(Also: My name number one feature request for both Screen Time & Digital Wellbeing is an API so I can export data and set up more sophisticated IFTTT-type rules)
Face Unlock works better than I expected but isn’t as convenient as a finger pint sensor:
Face Unlock requires two actions: Holding the device in front of my face plus swiping up. Unlocking with fingerprint on the other hand is just one action (You simultaneously tell the device that you want to unlock it and authenticate yourself).
Face Unlock doesn’t seem to work as reliably as the fingerprint sensor on my Pixel (I’d guess 90% success rate for Face Unlock, compared to 95%+ for fingerprint)
As I’ve written before, the fingerprint sensor is underrated as a secondary interface. Android only used it to pull down the notification center, but I think you could do so much more with it.
The Apple Wallet app is great, especially at the airport. Surprising that Google has never built something similar.
