What metrics do you keep on yourself, or your daily practices?

[blackbird]

Over the years I have consistently journaled. Some years I've gone so far as to log all consumption (broken down into component parts like sodium, fiber, etc). Other years I've logged pages read per day, miles walked, etc. I'm feeling the bug again, this whole quantifiable life psychosis, and I'm trying to focus on meaningful data points. ATM I'm looking at the following:

Resting heart rate - overall cardio indicator, with lower rates correlating with longevity
Calories consumed - in general, lower correlates with longevity
Flossing - in general, correlates with longevity
Hugs given - chemically and mentally conducive to improved immuno response
Sex - ditto
Previous night's hours slept - to maintain awareness of how this might correlate to my feeling the next day

What kind of data do you record, either in a formal structured way, or more loosely as a general practice, about yourself and your activities? How have you used the results?

Also, I apologize ahead of time for the slow response, about to go on a long car ride so it will be a few hours to few days before I can respond, I just wanted to get this out there while I remembered it.

[IlliniDave]

I keep track of how much time I spend on guitar practice, but only because I set a goal for myself for the year and I want to see if I meet it. That's about it right now. Not really the sort of thing you're asking about I guess. It could be considered a metric for the amount of time I spend everyday on recreation/enjoyment. I also keep track of my hours at work.

[blackbird]

That is the kind of thing I'm curious about actually. What do you plan to do if you do or don't meet it?

[IlliniDave]

That is the kind of thing I'm curious about actually. What do you plan to do if you do or don't meet it?

I don't have a plan for either eventuality, especially failing to meet it because I intend to meet it. Either way, I'll just sit down at the start of next year, reflect on the past year, and decide where to take it from there.

[7Wannabe5]

Quantifiable life psychosis - lol. Yeah, I've got that.

Just threw together a new spreadsheet. Starting this month, I am tracking hours spent on F (frugal, systems, scratch) activities, hours spent on H (health related activities), hours spent on E (education, erudition, skill practice/maintenance related activities), hours spent on W (work for money.) Also, hourly real net wage for work hours, body weight, and spending-to-the-penny. I'll probably integrate a few other things as I go, including stuff like health metrics I track less frequently.

Off the top of my head, some other metrics I have kept over the years would be waist measure, all sorts of specific exercise logs, kilocalories consumed, kilocalories burned, sexual frequency, daily subjective happiness rating, number of new places explored, number of new species identified/spotted, number of items de-cluttered, square ft. of garden weeded, number of shelves of books in the literature section of Borders on which I have read at least one book by every author.

Of course, this practice goes hand in hand with the practice of creating daily, weekly, monthly, bi-annual and yearly routines with reminders that pop-up from your calendar link and handy check-off lists, etc. etc. etc.

I would say that overall my adherence has been pretty poor, but I do better than if I don't keep track at all. Stick/carrot doesn't work that well with me, because I am very clever at creating rationalizations and also quite self-indulgent, so I try to approach it more like a weakly scientific study of the creature that is me towards the goal of better caring for me. Sometimes interesting things do pop-out. For instance, I didn't realize that I enjoyed travel (widely defined) almost as much as sex (not quite as widely defined) until I tracked both of these metrics and correlated with daily happiness. Also, after tracking both metrics off and on for many years, I now know that, for me, losing one lb. of fat requires as much discipline as approximately 10 hours of work. So, if/when I have to lose 10 lbs. (again-sigh), that is also the equivalent of having to pay off (100 hours X marginal hourly net wage) of debt.

[Seamus]

Daily:
Number of alcoholic drinks I had. This was the first thing I started keeping track of, back in 2012. I drank too much back then and keeping track helped keep it under control. I'd give myself a weekly limit which usually meant I wouldn't drink so much during the week because I wanted to get drunk over the weekend. Now I drink a lot less but I still think it's interesting.

Body weight. Decided to try to gain ten pounds last year. Five down, five to go. Unfortunately I appear to have stopped making progress.

Number of orgasms. No objective on this one, I just figure I'll find it interesting some day.

Weekly:
Finances. Net worth, everything I spent money on. Groceries is a separate sheet so I can keep track of nutrition long term.

Occasionally:
Mileage on the car. If this drops off enough I'll sell the car.

Measurements. Neck, chest, bicep, waist, thigh.

I've thought about doing sleep/wake times but I don't think I'd remember to record them.

[7Wannabe5]

@Seamus:

Based on my fairly extensive personal investigations on the topic, I can inform you with some degree of assurance that number or orgasms at your age will likely equal approximately 3x number of orgasms at age 52. Of course, I am not sure what value there is in this piece of information given that you do not live in a culture where you have to give any consideration to how many wives you will be able to keep.

[wood]

* Track expenditure down to the penny - seems to work better than budgeting when it comes to money management. A budget is a plan that always seems to fail somehow. Instead tracking helps me actually reduce expenditure because I'm being made aware precisely of the mistakes I'm doing.

* Training diary, but more a book of records (race times, heaviest lifts etc) - motivates me to keep pushing my limits. I fail to update this regularly though.

* General exercise + diet + blood sugar diary - to help manage my blood sugar and insulin because diabetes 1. I only did this in 2011 to educate myself about myself and haven't seen the need since.

That's about it but I've gotten many ideas from this thread. I've occasionally thought of creating my personal sort of "happiness indicator". How happy do I feel in the morning, afternoon and evening everyday and then track a few metrics to see if I can find a pattern to what makes me happier. What's stopped me so far is my arrogance of believing that I already know what makes me happier. Suggestions on what to track? Hours slept, social interaction, diet, exercise, needs unfulfilled and of course a happiness rating for each time bracket. More?

[IlliniDave]

* Track expenditure down to the penny ...

Yeah, I do this too although I round all the individual expenses up to the nearest whole dollar. Over time I only keep an annual summary (but could probably recover data at finer granularity if I felt like it). I also keep track of financial balances (invested assets, net worth) on a quarterly basis, not daily. I also have a handful of "look ahead" projections I keep an ongoing update of. Other than my recording some in my journal here I don't really track those over time.

Funny that given the nature of the site those didn't initially come to mind. I guess the examples in the OP got me thinking in a different direction. I also tend to think of them as just data primarily, rather than metrics, but that's probably a distinction without a difference.

[Scott 2]

Metrics go stale. Behaviors change at first, but then we are optimized to that metric. So I bring them in and out.

Metrics consume energy. I favor those that can be captured automatically, or with minimal work.

Leading, actionable metrics are more valuable. Seeing my spending is up 20% this week is better than realizing I saved nothing at the end of the month.

With that under consideration, my favorite is:

Heart rate variability - requires a $50 HR monitor, phone, and 10 minutes every morning. So, expensive. But it quantifies cumulative stress on the body. Easy to identify overly stressful periods,
immediately actionable.

I bring it in and out, due to the time cost.

I use mint to monitor spending / net worth. Jefit to monitor lifting. Both of those integrate into my day to day, making them easy ongoing metrics.

I've done the my fitness pal thing in the past, tracking macros. Effective, if you are willing to suffer through it. Too time expensive for me.

Something I've been interested to monitor, but never gone for, is blood glucose. Especially post meal. When I take down a pizza and a pint of ice cream, how hard does that really hit me? Does walking a little after help? Blood sugar problems are accumulations of those post meal spikes, so a highly actionable leading metric. Expensive though.

[SustainableHappiness]

Only quantified metric is net worth/expenses on a monthly basis.
Qualitative though:

Gratitude Journal - 3 to 6 things that were excellent or that I am grateful for from that day. Been doing it for about 1.5 years and I like it a lot.

Worked out or not - binary yes/no. Usually with a brief description of activities (outside of bike commute) taken e.g. RAN FUCKING HARD, BIKED FUCKING HARD, ROWED FUCKING HARD, Weak Workout Today, Sexy Times.

Overall judgement of day - Good Day, Bad day, Mediocre day, Fantastic day, yadayadayada

Generally I don't get worked up if I forget to track though, similar to if I eat something shitty in a day, or skip a workout...Just do better tomorrow.

[SustainableHappiness]

Oh I haven't ever used the results, or have a plan to. I just enjoy doing it and sometimes read stuff from 1 year ago with DW and say "Haha, remember when I was all SAD in February and then the sun came out and I got happy again?"

[Dragline]

Yeah, I try to keep track of weight, exercise, mood and general life events and how I felt about them in a journal every day or two. I add up the financials once a month -- I only allow one "trading day" in each tradeable account per month. Net worth is done once per year, along with the blood work and health metrics after the annual physical.

I read recently about this crazy dude who spent 4 hours per day doing a diary that essentially recorded his life in 5-minute increments. He ended up with 37.5 million words in 94 boxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Shields_(diarist)

I can't even imagine -- but I guess it was meaningful for him.

[blackbird]

Dragline, thanks for the link, that was very interesting!

Appreciate everyone's responses, would love to hear from others. I'm trying to identify metrics that can be quickly annotated at the end of the day for both reflection and reinforcement of positive goals.

I had not even thought about body weight, instead only focusing on calories, but I think the two together would be much more useful.

Thanks again!

[BMWalter333]

Steps Out, calories burned, calories consumed, net carbs consumed.
I've found the fitbit charge 2 gets the job done in terms of the first three, but you'll have to download a macro counting app for the last.

[enigmaT120]

I use Mint to track my spending. That's all I can think of.

[George the original one]

Did I reach the intended yields for my major crops (tomatoes, potatoes, onions, beets, strawberries, blueberries)?
Was my fishing/clamming license paid for by the amount of fish/clams harvested? (crabs would be included if only my wife were interested)
Did I successfully climb Saddle Mountain again this year?
Have I cut & split & dried enough fire wood to make it through the winter without turning on the electric heat?
Sex & weight & strength where I want them?
Is my wife happy?
Is there still enough money in the accounts?

[Chris]

I have a distaste for waste, so I track consumption: spending ($), electricity (KWh), gas (gallons), trash (bags)

The last one was added this year. By minimizing food waste and packaging, I assumed my non-recyclable trash production was already low. But I didn't know for sure, hence the tracking. Upshot: the less trash I generate, the less time I spend tracking it (-:

As a blood donor, I also keep track of the vitals that the blood center performs (temperature, pulse, blood pressure, hemoglobin).

[Lillailler]

Annually:
Net financial assets

Daily:
In the morning a to-do list, to focus attention
At night a have-done list, to congratulate self on accomplishments

Regarding strength, during each training session:
Weight, sets and reps, plus a note of whether it is time to increase the weight, for each exercise

I have found living by a to-do only just increases stress and decreases quality of life. Living without a to-do means too many not-fun but must-dos get pushed aside. The have-done list makes me happier, and it also makes me tackle some awkward but necessary things - how cool to add this one to my have-done tonight!

[Farm_or]

I also track economics, but not only annually, a few times a week. That may be due to the ever changing farm business?

I also use the to do and done list. I I have to give myself credit for all the thankless tasks and the non-value added tasks that must be done. They won't get done on their own and the nature of thankless jobs means there's no other recognition for doing it.

I also keep track of weights amounts, reps, and frequency of work outs. When I was cycling regularly, I used to track my resting hr daily, but now only occasionally. Same with stepping on a scale. Effective sleep is another consideration that I keep track of.