Personal Science - Some Numbers

[justbeast]

I started out telling a story, of what I've been searching for and moving towards, and how I came to these numbers, and why I think they're important.
But that post got too long. So I'll talk about the numbers first, and then post an explanation/backstory. (Bad sign, huh? - skipping the foreplay

Comments

[justbeast]

I agree with you, time tracking is a serious impediment. (And part of the reason behind my choice of numbers & units - cause they're the easiest ones to track).

Tracking coding pomodoros is easy. I load up http://www.pomodorohelper.com/todo_items , create a task (just one for the day, cause I'm lazy), and hit play. It rings when it's done, which means I can take a break & read email, and then I hit play again. (and forget about it until it rings). So, that part is not intrusive. (I also have the free Pomodoro app on the iphone, but end up never using it).

Sex is easy. (at least the counting it part is :) )

Word count is easy. I just paste my blog entry into a cut & paste javascript word count thing (whatever comes up first when I google for 'word count').

Time spent with wife is slightly harder to track (in the sense of, I don't want to pull out my iphone and hit play on the timer). But, it usually turns out ok. In the sense of - I only have about 1-2 hours of free time per evening. So I can judge it roughly - did I spend half my evening with her? My whole evening? quarter? etc.
During the weekend, when it's the whole day, that becomes harder. I estimate (glance at the watch when starting something, glance back at it in a couple of hours, etc). The hardest part on weekends is judging what should count as quality time, and what shouldn't. I try to keep my overall goal in mind - increased intimacy, quality of time, etc.

So that's the tracking part of it. As for recording.. I thought I wanted to do it on the iPhone. I spent WEEKS on searching for a good program to let me track arbitrary variables. I finally settled on Daily Tracker, which is brilliant for just this purpose.
But as soon as I found it, I realize that I'd just rather use a Google Spreadsheet. Which is what I do.

Does that help?

[matt_arnold]

Sex is easy. (at least the counting it part is :) )
"Roll over, I can't reach my iPhone"!

[justbeast]

Precisely :)