Just posted a long update to my self-tracking set up at the moment. Join this branch if you have feedback, questions, or suggestions on how to improve it!

Secondary question: what are you tracking now, and why?

I want to know what my brain is doing when I can't control it. That's why yesterday I started tracking dreams. A lot of times, dreams make weird connections between things that happened in your life and it's really curious how a movie you watched and a meeting you had can get merged into one.

I'm about to take my weight under control and I'm doing a bit of research for myself on tracking. So far I was interested in exact measurements.

For example, it doesn't seem to be the same for me to walk a block to the nearest pub, walk a mile or two to the office or take a 20 mile hike to the woods. In your spreadsheet it all will be T for "walked" but it all is very different in distance, calories burned or how much tired you were afterwards, to name a few.

Your approach seem to be more focused on true/false values and essentially on quality of any given day. I'm wondering if t/f approach good enough to find meaningful correlations?

Alex, for me the act of walking to work is about much more than just burning calories. It's about having time in the morning to think, and preparing for my day.

The point I was trying to make is that you should first think about what meaning you're trying to get out of the measurements, and then only measure to the precision that is required for that meaning. So if there's something meaningful to you in calories or distance, then measure that. If the meaning is somewhere else (getting out to exercise, or losing weight, etc) then measure that.

I track walking, running, biking all as a 0/1. It's the act of doing any of those things in a day (not the amount) that is most meaningful for me - in terms of feeling happy/healthy.

I also track my weight (and plan to do so the rest of my life) using the Hacker's Diet 10 day running average metric, so that I can make adjustments as needed to stay in my ideal range. After several years of doing that intensively, now it's mostly an objective confirmation what I already feel from my body/clothes fit, and I look at the graph infrequently. But there was a huge learning period (I attempt to talk about it here, Alex - vimeo.com ) where I was tracking exact things - like #miles biked - because that motivated me to be more active.

Thanks, Amelia. The video is very interesting.

On a professional front, I track my time and expenses for billing and tax purposes.

On the personal side, I would like to find some reliable ways to track my various health metrics like weight, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, etc. The technology for doing this sort of tracking automatically is still on the horizon.

A few weeks ago I finally got a Fitbit so I'm tracking everything available there.

In addition, I've started (for 2 weeks now) a spreadsheet similar to what Buster details on his website where I'm tracking other things and trying to compare with my "mood". One thing I'm keeping track of that I didn't see on Buster's is basically a T/F for "Social Interaction".

A year ago I started working remote from home. My closest co-worker is 1,100 miles away. So I've got entire days that I barely leave the house and the only in-person interaction I have is with my girlfriend when she gets home. I'm almost positive this affects my moody so I'm tracking it.

As far as mood I'm logging Morning (like samiinkinen.com) & Evening.