I decided to take this a step further — what if I made a real effort to note down what I did every minute of my life? What if I recorded all the food I ate, the water I drank, exercises I did, and even my happiness? Not such an impossible feat, given that in this Web 2.0 world there’s an app for everything. So I decided to track my life for at least a week to see how feasible it was to do.

Gathering Tools for Life Tracking

Tracking every aspect of one’s life sounds like a daunting task, so I needed to automate as much of it as possible. I started with ManicTime, a downloadable app that tracks computer usage. Among the stats it gathers are the applications you use and the web sites you visit. You can also tag your timeline to better identify what you were doing at any given time. My tags included “digital fiddling,” “email,” “online reading,” “freelance writing work,” “design work,” and “personal writing.”

While ManicTime is tied to computer usage, I also used it to tag the time I spent away from the computer including “sleep,” “eating,” “chores” and “offline reading.” I simply tracked my offline time via pen and paper and tagged it in ManicTime at the end of the day. This was a handy way for me to compile all my time information in one place, as well as take advantage of ManicTime’s statistical features.

Remembering a previous post by Dawn Foster, I also signed up for DailyBurn to track my nutritional intake as well as my exercise. Its food database was quite extensive, so I rarely had to input nutritional information manually.

Next came the most difficult part: tracking my mood. After a bit of research, I found some specific methods over at Kevin Kelly’s Quantified Self blog. The only disadvantage of the proposed methods was that they were too specific. I wanted something simpler and more automated, so I signed up for Track Your Happiness instead.

Findings and Results

By just the second day of my experiment, I was already learning something. To my surprise, I spend most of my waking hours writing, whether paid (freelance work) or unpaid (personal projects). This came as a surprise because most days I feel like I don’t really do anything, so it’s comforting to know that I spend that much time focused on nothing else but putting one word after another.

Here are some other non-work stats, gathered throughout the entire experiment (daily averages):

• Digital fiddling — 0.54 hours
• Sleep — 7.67 hours
• Family time — 2.67 hours
• Time spent tracking and analyzing these things — 1.10 hours

I was also glad to discover that I always drank more than nine glasses of water per day. My average calorie count wass within the norm (1638 Calories), but I had the tendency to go over my carbohydrate limits per day.

As for my mood, it appears that I’m a generally happy person — except when I talk to children or work on things I neither want nor have to do. The big surprise, I suppose, is that I’m happiest when I’m planning my business.

Tracking Your Life: Should You Do It?

Here’s the thing I have to admit: except for getting my happiness report, I didn’t finish the experiment. I only lasted until the fifth day, and by then, doing all this tracking was taking its toll on me. I saw that as I tried to keep up with jotting down every fleeting moment, I was getting more stressed. Sure, it only took me roughly an hour a day to track and analyze data, but that’s an hour of my life I’d rather spend on something else.

Quantifying your time, nutrition, and mood can be a learning experience — but you need to know your limits. If tracking your life lessens your enjoyment of it, then either change your approach or only track what’s necessary.

What aspects of your life or work do you keep track of? How do you keep track of them?

Image by karen_d from flickr

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printfriendly — Make Any Site Printer-Friendly

Many sites nowadays will have a “printer-friendly” button, which often just strips the web page of any fancy CSS and gives you a bare-bones text document that won’t eat up too much of your precious ink or toner. I know that for all the recent web site work I’ve done for clients, I always make sure to include just such a version. Unfortunately, not everyone does the same.
For those times when the button is missing, and printing the web page with images, etc., would result in too much of a dent in your ink supplies, there’s printfriendly. All you have to do is enter any URL into the field on its main page, and you immediately get a stripped-down version which you can then print or save as a PDF. Webmasters can also get the code for a printfriendly button to use on their own site, so that they don’t have to code a printer-friendly version for themselves.

Geek Chart — Show Off Where You Share Stuff Online

Ever wonder whether you share more stuff on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or your blog? Geek Chart can help you find out, and then display that info to others in an attractive, easy-to-read pie chart format. Just enter your information for the relevant networks you want to measure (Facebook is unfortunately not yet available), and Geek Chart generates a color-coded pie that shows how much data you have associated with each account.

Mine is currently heavily skewed towards Twitter, but that’s because if you read the fine print, it only takes into consideration your last 30 days of activity. If you spend a lot of time on your social network content, this might be a great way to show visitors to your own page exactly where your attention lies, and what might therefore be the best way to reach you.

trackle — Track Anything, Anywhere on the Web

Google Alerts are a great way to stay up to date with a favorite subject or news category. I have a variety of both blog and news alerts set up so that I receive regular notifications via email when something noteworthy goes on in my areas of interest. Trackle aims to do the same thing, but adds more oomph than Google Alerts is currently capable of.

For example, you can keep abreast of crime in your own neighborhood, or job postings, or even your own web presence (good for those of us who make our business here). Through trackle, you create “tracklets”, or customized web crawlers that return custom information to you based on criteria you specify.

There are tons of pre-made tracklets available to choose from, and you can receive alerts in a number of different ways, including via web through trackle’s own interface, through your phone via SMS, or through email. Also, you can specify the frequency with which you receive updates, and choose to either get them as they occur, or as a collected package once daily.

These tools may not be particularly powerful, nor do they provide any kind of revolutionary service. They do, however, perform small, potentially useful tasks well, and they’re free, which is more than reason enough to consider adding them to your toolbox.

Found any cool tools recently? Let us know in the comments.

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