Tracking things is awesome. If you analyze it afterwards.

03 Jul, 2025

I have a tracking problem.

I like to track everything possible. With a wide variety of apps and options. And my biggest wish is for an all-in-one app that can track everything, create correlations (meaningful ones – this is where really smart AI would be needed) and doesn't restrict me in terms of connectivity, i.e. which sources I can connect to and which I can't.

But honestly, once I have this all-in-one tracking evaluation app, what then? I did this for a while with exist.io. Yes, I even bought the premium model for a year. It was fun for a long time to track things and have them tracked every day. The latter was done by connecting Mastodon (posts and comments per day), Last.fm for everything I listened to, Trackt for everything I watched, Toggl for productive time, blah blah blah. That was totally cool for a while. But I'm tired. Really tired of tracking. Even typing things into an app is too much effort for me. Connecting to other services that may even track things independently is the right way to go. But Exist in particular limits me too much. Only selected apps/sources are available. I took every one from this pool, sometimes even creating extra accounts and bending over backwards to use them, only to end up with evaluations that I never actually look at.

I then switched to Guava for health tracking. That made a lot more sense. In combination with Apple Health, my Fitbit wristband, Yazio for food tracking, etc., all the values were entered there. I enriched these with manual values in the app and voila, I had a reasonably interesting health evaluation, which I never really looked at in detail.

So what's the deal with me? I think it's the tracking itself. Writing things down so they're just there. That rocks. Whether I then do anything with this data... well... that's another story. It's just there.

The real problem is manual tracking

Food tracking is already “intense”. Typing every little thing into the app... but in the end, it helps with weight loss. Although, to be honest, it's more for a clear conscience. Because even without the app, I can see what I eat and what I don't eat. And I'm not completely stupid when it comes to what has a lot of unnecessary calories and what doesn't. However. The data is now in there and, yes,... it's in there.

Moving on: There's tracking the series and films I've watched – manually. There's tracking three nice things a day, every day – manually. Writing a diary (also some kind of tracking) – manually. Tracking things I've done to remind myself when the last time was – manually, and so on and so forth. I do it. More or less regularly. At the moment, it's stagnating. But as I said, in the end, it's in there somewhere. Done.

What to do?

I'm switching to Daylio – again. Daylio is a nice app that I install and delete every few months. In it, I can track when I last went to the hairdresser, for example. Or the last time I gave flowers as a gift – hey, don't laugh, it's important. So will I stick with it in the long run? I don't know. BUT: Daylio has one decisive advantage, which I really recognized yesterday when I reinstalled the app. At a glance, I can see the last few days with individual terms. What did I do there? Ah, okay. And that's why my general mood was great or lousy?! Aha! That's quite nice. But as I said, long term it's actually nonsense.

So what now? Throw away the tracking? No, not really. At least I have the feeling that this data will be super important to me at some point. That feeling alone is worth something. And when I die and someone happens to log into my accounts, they can see that on July 3, 2025, I blogged something, ate cereal, was on the cross trainer, then took a shower and washed my hair. At least I'm leaving something behind for future generations. Yay.

With that in mind, I'm off to the anonymous trackaholics.

#tech