I have made a lot of progress in the last two years by developing a suite of simple productivity/life-logging tools for myself. The tools are technologically simple, but because they are customized specifically to me, they are quite useful and useable. Unlike a lot of similar one-size-fits-all tools, my tools have all and only the features I want. The suite includes:
TODO list (with a priority calculator that increases the priority of older tasks, so I don’t get bogged down)
Chore logging (remind me when it’s time to get a haircut, clean my bathtub, etc)
Finance analysis (download CSV files from my bank account, categorize them semi-automatically, aggregate them)
Pomodoro system
Activity Log (keep track of what I did each day)
Junk Food/Alcohol consumption tracker
I recommend programming-savvy people try out building their own productivity tools. But I wanted also to poll people about whether they would pay me to develop some of these tools for them:
I’ve been frustrated with available self-tracking tools.
(Food trackers are slooooow and interface poorly with exercise trackers; I have never yet found a mood tracker that allows you to look at statistics; various other things like that.)
Are the features you want basically simple? Do you have a specific list of features in mind that you want and that other products don’t offer, or are you just vaguely dissatisfied with current products?
In my mind a mood tracker app is just a frontend for a simple database table, but am I missing something? Do you have a theory of why the other products didn’t get it right?
Yes, it’s very simple. Things that I often find I want:
*a daily tracker that allows me to input a value every day for something I want to track, PLUS a view that allows me to see my past stats over time
*for food tracking, quicker lookups to the database of foods (this is the time-consuming part)
*a food and exercise tracker that has both a database of foods and a database of exercises (MyFitnessPal believes that weight training burns zero calories)
HabitRPG is my main home-base productivity tool but it doesn’t allow me to look at stats.
A mood-tracker app on the phone sends randomized reminders and allows you to input a value (your mood) and a word (the activity you’re doing at the time). For some reason, I haven’t found a happiness tracker that allows you to look at a graph of mood over time.
I imagine that my frustrations with food and exercise trackers are either technical (maybe database lookups are inherently hard) or due to my eccentricities (most people only do cardio). I can’t imagine why it’s so rare for self-trackers of all kinds to show trends over time.
I’ve had good experience with MyFitnessPal with respect to speed, and find the features sufficient for my purposes. I manually enter my exercise data, so I can not comment on automatic exercise tracking.
I found FitDay to be annoyingly slow, but I used the site for years before MyFitnessPal.
It is a webapp with a vanilla Java/Javascript/SQLite stack. Using SQLite instead of a full DB engine makes things a lot simpler, and is appropriate for a single-user/small team use case.
I have made a lot of progress in the last two years by developing a suite of simple productivity/life-logging tools for myself. The tools are technologically simple, but because they are customized specifically to me, they are quite useful and useable. Unlike a lot of similar one-size-fits-all tools, my tools have all and only the features I want. The suite includes:
TODO list (with a priority calculator that increases the priority of older tasks, so I don’t get bogged down)
Chore logging (remind me when it’s time to get a haircut, clean my bathtub, etc)
Finance analysis (download CSV files from my bank account, categorize them semi-automatically, aggregate them)
Pomodoro system
Activity Log (keep track of what I did each day)
Junk Food/Alcohol consumption tracker
I recommend programming-savvy people try out building their own productivity tools. But I wanted also to poll people about whether they would pay me to develop some of these tools for them:
[pollid:1172]
I’ve been frustrated with available self-tracking tools. (Food trackers are slooooow and interface poorly with exercise trackers; I have never yet found a mood tracker that allows you to look at statistics; various other things like that.)
Are the features you want basically simple? Do you have a specific list of features in mind that you want and that other products don’t offer, or are you just vaguely dissatisfied with current products?
In my mind a mood tracker app is just a frontend for a simple database table, but am I missing something? Do you have a theory of why the other products didn’t get it right?
Yes, it’s very simple. Things that I often find I want:
*a daily tracker that allows me to input a value every day for something I want to track, PLUS a view that allows me to see my past stats over time
*for food tracking, quicker lookups to the database of foods (this is the time-consuming part)
*a food and exercise tracker that has both a database of foods and a database of exercises (MyFitnessPal believes that weight training burns zero calories)
HabitRPG is my main home-base productivity tool but it doesn’t allow me to look at stats.
A mood-tracker app on the phone sends randomized reminders and allows you to input a value (your mood) and a word (the activity you’re doing at the time). For some reason, I haven’t found a happiness tracker that allows you to look at a graph of mood over time.
I imagine that my frustrations with food and exercise trackers are either technical (maybe database lookups are inherently hard) or due to my eccentricities (most people only do cardio). I can’t imagine why it’s so rare for self-trackers of all kinds to show trends over time.
I’ve had good experience with MyFitnessPal with respect to speed, and find the features sufficient for my purposes. I manually enter my exercise data, so I can not comment on automatic exercise tracking.
I found FitDay to be annoyingly slow, but I used the site for years before MyFitnessPal.
What’s your hardware/OS platform?
It is a webapp with a vanilla Java/Javascript/SQLite stack. Using SQLite instead of a full DB engine makes things a lot simpler, and is appropriate for a single-user/small team use case.