The times where I collected the most data about my life were not necessarily the times where I felt like I was making the most interesting insights about my life. Said another way, more data doesn’t always mean more better conclusions. Ahem. Something like that.
For the past year or so I’ve adhered to a pretty simple weekly habit that has made my efforts to quantify aspects of my life so much more useful. I call it my Weekly Personal Metrics spreadsheet.
The problem it’s trying to solve is — in a world of lots of data easily collected, how do you even remember what you’re tracking, let alone actually remember to go look at it and see if you can glean any insights? In a perfect world all of the interesting data I want to collect would be done so passively and a smart app or operating system would crunch it and feed me interesting tidbits (yes, I know Exist.io and Addapp exist but I have found them…. wanting).
The simple trick is to sit down once a week and collect all my various data points and manually add them to a simple spreadsheet. Then, I can look at them and compare them against the previous week (which is what I do most often and where the red/green cell colors come from). If I was more industrious I could make all sorts of visualizations to show how I’m doing on the various metrics I’m tracking (that might be an end of year project actually).
This simple little addition to my weekly routine has actually been pretty great. It helps me notice when I’m letting things spin out of control (I’m looking at you Sleep and Weight) and make changes before things get totally out of hand. It lets me really lean into as many passive sources of data collection as possible because instead of just letting them slip away into the ether I know I’m going to extract everything once a week.
I’ll go into more depth about why I track what I track in a future article. For now, you’ll just have to be happy with the nuts and bolts of setting up a Weekly Personal Metrics spreadsheet.
Making your own is as simple as figuring out a.) what’s important enough (or easy enough) to track? b.) when will you update it? That’s about it. Find important things that are easy to track (sleep is a good starting point if you have an Apple Watch and weight is kind of a no-brainer if you have a scale) and once a week pull the data into a spreadsheet. Do that every week for a long time and you’ll start to see the patterns emerge.
This is part of my semi-regular* series where I conceive of an article idea, write it, edit it, and publish it in 30 minutes or less. Have a thought? Leave a comment or follow me on Twitter.
*Where semi-regular means I sometimes go weeks without writing.