Thanks!
I actually saw a few problems: one that you mentioned with actually remembering, another with the friction of having to go to an app/write on paper etc, and another with the way to follow up on that data (browse and analyze). If you're interested, you can see what I cam up with here: https://www.t12n.io it's still on beta and in development but I think it solves those problems well (planning to add more features for better analysis too). Would love to hear what you think if you feel like sharing.
> Or, ask a professional, i.e., a doctor.
I'll refer to his first, of course I'll go to the doctor for anything serious :) I'm trying to optimize for less severe things that can be VERY difficult to diagnose, if only because they can have so many reasons causing them, and the lack of resources due to their low severity.
> canvas the literature for some causal hypotheses based in what we already know, and then design the experiment
This is something I'm trying to do, but was looking into a better way to track and follow up on. I was thinking for example, it can be potentially easy to see a correlation between back pains and a new type of work out I started to do. I'm trying to track these kind of things and see if I find correlations (will try better, automated analysis soon too).
Thanks for the reference for Quest Diagnostics, will check it out!
Cool system you have implemented there! May I ask if you have a way to process and analyze the data? Do you feel a need to?
wrt to voice assistant automation- someone mentioned here in the comments they use the Google assistant to add stuff to keep or notes, maybe you can try using something like this, combined with another automation to store the data in your preferred structure? (I tried something similar before developing the app, but without using voice assistant and with possibly simpler, structured data and it worked well).
At the moment, not really, I don't have much manual structured tracking. I do use Obsidian+SyncThing for journaling (Although it's still not 100% the perfect solution), and I use hashtags for structure pretty heavily.
I have a Garmin watch that tracks heart rate, steps, and sleep, a Bluetooth scale, and my toothbrush can track when I brush and for how long, I'm pretty big on buying the smart version of everything, unless it's basic functionality would stop working if the cloud shuts down.
The main analysis I do is failures. I've learned that for me, practice does not make perfect, and any mistake I make will almost certainly happen again without focused attention, so my #mistake hashtag has been very helpful.
Cool idea, and super interesting! Way to go on the diligence!
I'm curious how often (and how) do you follow up on these. also if you feel comfortable sharing- what other hashtags do you use? can you give examples of things you put there?
I usually have a hashtag for every subject I'm interested in, if I should happen to learn something new that day, plus a few others like #dream.
Sometimes I even think about building a new custom notes app, that's purely just a Facebook Messenger window with yourself, with search and a hashtag list, or switching to logseq.
I usually follow up on mistakes by looking for patterns and... generally just avoiding the conditions that led to the mistake entirely.
Like, one of my personal rules is "There is no later". I try not to rely on memory for anything important, I assume the concept of remembering something later is only accessible to computers and sticky notes.
Are you thinking of a way to automate the actual tracking? Do you find it a hassle to do manually? (this is the main thing I was trying to solve, check out https://www.t12n.io )
I thought about having some periodic reminders, maybe using something in the spreadsheet (e.g. columns) as prompts or questions to be answered, but have not implemented anything yet. I am pretty disciplined myself so I rarely forget to write down an expense after I put my wallet away, but I can totally see that this is be a pain point for some users.
I could add a feature like that, but I do not really have lots of users to get feedback from, yet. I am currently in the "tell people" stage after I "did things" [1], so I should probably try to make a landing page as cool as yours ;)
Yeah sorry maybe it was a bit confusing. I meant that Joplin allows me to have a "structured" personal diary by categorizing experience and knowledge of different areas into notebooks instead of a simple "What happened today" page, i.e. what happens in "less structured" personal diaries.
Not sure I understood what you connect to Evernote with Zapier to track vitamin D usage and mood (or was Zapier only relevant for the weather and the others are manual?). Also, if it's ok to ask- what's the ephemeral value in tracking these?
I used Zappier to essentially take the local weather and send it to my evernote email address (which you just get by having evernote) so it would create an entry for me with the weather.
Vitamin D and mood was done manually for me. All of these were part of my Timeline notebook that focused on daily events.
I consider this "ephemeral" tracking because it's not data you can benefit from in a long term fashion. For example if my happiness ratio is up by 2 points if I take 5000 extra IU of vitamin D a day, it might not be true 10 years from now. Which makes any data you get useful for a short time, but then it's just noise. You can't leverage.
Since it's just data points you can't even claim there is an emotional connection to it. I do tend to be very light in terms of data though, perhaps you might like seeing things from 15 years ago.
