Julians.name

Experiments in data/life visualization

November 18 2009, 12:32pm

Daytum lets you track key inputs/outputs I’ve been investigating tools and methods for tracking, measuring and displaying key inputs and outputs for daily life. Example – Scenario ‘a’ Inputs Sleep = 8 hours Engergy = Good Eating well = YES Excercise = YES Outputs

feeling of satisfaction calm, assured money in the bank

Example scenario ‘b’ inputs

stay up late get drunk chuck beer bottles on the front lawn while singing ABBA songs in my falsetto voice

Outputs

jail house poor house

More This includes work and home life. For example I want to raise the visibility of certain tasks for my young kids like doing their homework, studying, eating the right food and exercising. I went looking for web based solutions that would also work well on paper and on my iPhone. This research netted me squat. That drove me back into the waiting arms of spreadsheets and online solutions like Google Docs and using Google Gadgets to add visual indicators to my data (like the nice dial graphic below). Spreadsheets are great for flexibility but lacking somewhat in their setup time and maintenance. Back to more research. I finally started finding some good links. One tool I’m trying is called daytum and the user interface is by far the best out of those I’ve found. However, I came across a problem when I tried to print out pages for my kids for our refrigerator. They have no css print style sheet! Grrrrr. Printouts looks like Mosaic outputs from 1997! So if printing things out is important to you then by all means try something else. For now I’ve moved on to evaluating me-trics.com. Like daytum, it has a social aspect, allows for multiple inputs (web/mobile, etc.) and also integrates online tools and activities like twitter, Flickr, and others which is a nice add! I’ll let you know how that goes. Er, and if they have a print style sheet. Why am I doing this? Because I’m sick of important things falling off the table. I believe long term fulfillment and success is a product of the cumulative effect of short terms actions. While it’s hard to keep an end goal in sight sometimes it’s usually not too difficult to check in and see if your daily habits and actions are. It’s hard to manage what you can’t measure and measuring requires tracking.

a