HP: data collection

resolution season has begun — or at least, people are thinking about it.  gretchen rubin just posted on foundation habits, and bright white january magazines are on newstands.  i have been giving thought to certain things i would like to focus on for next year — and just how i plan to go about creating accountability and awareness of some of these habits.

while i loooooove [and will remain attached to] paper forever — especially for brainstorming, planning,  reflecting and writing lists — smartphone apps are a better fit for certain types of self-monitoring.  there’s an entire quantified self movement devoted to tracking almost any nuance of life that you could think of — from time allocation at work to detailed workout data.  and basically, if you can think of it, there’s probably already an app for that.

just a few examples of things that could easily be tracked:

time spent online / checking email / or really, doing anything

spending habits

detailed dietary data

sleep patterns [yours . . . or those of your child, as i remember doing with annabel with baby connect!]

diabetes control [databetes looks really promising and cool . . . plus i like the name].

here, i played around with one time-tracking app [ATracker – since it was free] to capture time spent on a few key activities.  [one of my main objectives = reducing mindless email / fb / internet time!].  of course, just having the obligation to report these mindless activities helped me stick to my goal — for today, anyway.  i’ll have to give the experiment more time to see if i actually can use it to shape some of these habits for the better.

anyone have any experience with this style of tracking — or are you partial to notebooks and checkboxes?  [to be truthful, i absolutely am — but for time-tracking, the automatic timers are pretty handy].  did you find that it impacted your behavior . . . and were any changes permanent?

off to lie on the couch and watch glee – definitely in that first green category [as was writing this post 🙂 ]