Personally, I tried logging all my finances, my workouts, my diet, my car's miles, etc. for a few years. I never really could get into a very good habit of it, despite any amount of discipline/self-hatred. In the end, these partial and incomplete lists of things became more of a list of 'failures' than anything, personally. What data I could gleam from it was either obvious ('I feel bad when it's been 12+ hours since when I last ate') or they were just too noisy to really get any actionable response from.
Going for the highlights, and on an irregular schedule, was better for me personally.
To be honest I think you’re correct here about focusing on the highlights. I’ve read about things like quantifiedself and I’m honestly really interested in those types of things, but more from a distance—I think too much persistent active logging drags me down and feels like a weight so it isn’t worth it.
When I think about logging, I think about wanting to grab those highlights, and while I’m at it to also unify some of the other logging and tracking that I’m already passively keeping, like my bank/credit card statement. I’ve come around to the idea that I need the smallest number of ongoing projects as possible so that they can continue for the long term, and unifying some of that noise brings so much context if there’s a way I can do it fairly effortlessly.
I have this image in my head of having something in a scrollable/ queryable/ filterable/ or outline view and being able to dive into it . For a long time now I’ve sort of spiraled on the same topics of interest that I periodically return to so I need a log or something to help me expand my attention span to cope with cycles on the order of months or years instead of just days and weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm9CQn07OjU
Basically, just get into the habit of logging first, then worry about making it seamless.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-man-book-creatin...
Go for just the highlights, ignore the noise.
Personally, I tried logging all my finances, my workouts, my diet, my car's miles, etc. for a few years. I never really could get into a very good habit of it, despite any amount of discipline/self-hatred. In the end, these partial and incomplete lists of things became more of a list of 'failures' than anything, personally. What data I could gleam from it was either obvious ('I feel bad when it's been 12+ hours since when I last ate') or they were just too noisy to really get any actionable response from.
Going for the highlights, and on an irregular schedule, was better for me personally.