I’m addicted to information. I need all the data points I can get. So what better idea is there than to start tracking EVERYTHING about me on a daily basis. That’s where the little black book comes in to play.
To help track my resolutions in 2012 I used a series of apps, mostly for running, some others for overall health, gym training and weight watching. These helped for the most part, but they never quite stuck. I also had a tendency to just write random things down on my bathroom mirror using dry erase markers. This was a great idea, until I could hardly see myself through all the writing. The obvious thing to do in this case is figure out what I want to keep, and erase the rest. So obviously I expanded to the glass shower doors instead, because that’s more my style. If there was a window in the bathroom, that wouldn’t be safe either.
There are two main reasons in my mind why I never really liked the apps.The main reason being there was just no way to see all of the information at once, everything is siloed in it’s own place. It’s great that I can track my weight or keep track of all the food that I eat and see aggregated totals of nutrients, or that I can make notes about my day, and track my running totals along with what I did at the gym. I can do all of those separately, but there’s no way to see how one may affect the other without jumping back and forth. The second reason I hate the apps is that they make you feel guilty. For example, a weight tracking app will ask you to set a goal, as long as you’re making progress toward that goal you’re happy to enter as many data points as possible; however, when you have a cheat day for instance, and you have a random spike, you don’t want to enter it. Since you wouldn’t be able to look back and see the cause there’s really no point in entering it right? Right? RIGHT?!? Any reason why I purposely wouldn’t enter valid data points makes me feel guilty, and then I don’t want to use it anymore. I do still use RunKeeper and Sleep Analyzer (my alarm clock) regularly though, which I find really useful, at least until the Fitbit flex is released this spring.
I decided I would try things the old fashioned way for a while, and see if that helped at all so in mid December I bought a small notebook. A Moleskine that’s about 3″x5″ and started thinking about what the best design was. For about a week the only thing that I decided on was that each day should have its own page, and not more, if possible. It took a few more days to decide to keep track of weight, body fat, exercise (running and other activities are separate), everything I eat including time and how I feel before and after I eat it, times that I wake up, get into bed and go to sleep along with how I feel at those times, random notes about what happened that day, a tag or theme for the day if applicable, steps taken during the day and lastly some goals or small things I want to accomplish during that day. I always put the same things in the same spots so that I can quickly compare from page to page. There’s a small column down the right side that holds the most important data points so that I can more quickly see those. I like that I can see my entire day summed up all on one page, and I can compare days by just flipping back and forth. I think this will make it easier for me to identify trends and put into action some plans to try and capitalize on those patterns. Along with being able to see the summary view as a whole I’ve started to notice that just by writing things down it’s causing me to be more thoughtful about each item so I’m more likely to notice when things occur repeatedly.
So in the end I think this will help me keep track of and stay focused on my goals for the year. I’m open to changing things, adding more tracking for other things that I haven’t even thought of yet, or just scrapping the whole thing if I don’t feel like it’s working. Until then, I’ll just continue to annoy the people around me when I pull out my pencil and little black book and start randomly writing things down, as if this is the 80’s or something.
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