I started a Quantified-Self spreadsheet back in 2019, since then I've been on & off with tracking multiple aspects about my life: training, sleep, nutrition, vitals, screentime focus, places, and other misc lifestyle & behavioral metrics.
Fact is routine sucks & it’s about time we dynamically quantify what matters. I discovered that metrics I care about change over time, and often I would find myself having to continue tracking metrics I stopped caring about for the time-being just to maintain the system.
This effect often tends to happen in sync with shifts due to Rotated Focus, where I focus on / optimize for different goals at different parts of the year.
So for example, the #1 goal for Q1 could be prioritizing deep work, Q2 for prioritizing a bulking cycle, Q3 for prioritizing travel, etc. And so in different parts of the year I’d want to prioritize tracking different things, thus dynamically.
So traditional tracking doesn’t quite allow for this -at least in my experience- I discovered I needed a new approach, one where daily friction towards metrics for non-prioritized areas is kept minimal at all times, so I have the data, without having to invest the same cognitive load to maintain the continuity of the system.
What I really want is something that helps me navigate correlations between several areas of my life whether they’re prioritized or not. I need to see how my body & my mind are performing at all times, how they respond to environmental/societal factors, how i’m making progress, and how my overall quality of life is being affected.
Furthermore, I could often find instant value in the least expected/navigated metrics. So with this in mind, I want the freedom & control to tinker with my data at any future point of time even if I don’t quite see how much value it could offer me at the moment.
That is a very important concept to touch upon, because we often find value in hindsight, and as your aspirations & goals change, you adapt to your new inputs and you don’t want to sacrifice from your past what could have helped you in your future.
Like in all aspects of life, history is always there to help us navigate from worse to better, from older to newer, and from lower to higher. So imagine having a full history of everything you did, wrote or thought, at all times. This could be the base for a new transformative tool, one through which you are becoming a version of yourself that is not only comparable with your version of the last year, but comparable to that of the last month, meaning you are: consuming knowledge, building connections between ideas, interacting with people & systems, at a much much faster rate than most people could. This could be a real-life hack for the modern age since we couldn’t possibly have such a powerful shortcut into our consciousness before, but now with open-source tools, powerful computation, and data awareness, we are more capable than ever.