For the last few years I've really wanted to track all of my "good" habits and then look at the data and see what I can learn from them. However, I would always burn out a few months into the process. This was the first time I was able to go a whole year tracking my habits. I used Daylio/Google fit to track my habits. Then imported the data into my own DB schema and plotted everything with ploty. If anyone is interested in building better habits I found the book "Atomic Habits" to be very good.
I tracked 6 habits that can be broken down into 3 categories.
Note: Lots of overlap with reading since I was reading books with math and was never quite sure how to categorize that activty.
Click on a section to zoom in
Over all I feel good about the balance between the 3 categories, although I definatly need to add some more weight training. Yoga would have been much higher if not for Covid and my studio going remote, but it gave me an opportunity to start running more often
Click on the legend to filter activities in and out
Didn't expect tuesday to be my best day, but I suppose it makes sense. Monday I'm coming off from the weekend and Tuesday I'm more motivated to actually do something
Around the end of april I started studying datascience with a friend, which really helpped me stay motivated. We started with a programming project, and then moved on to reading a text book together in June.
At the end of June I got shin splints so I stopped running, starting feeling better and tried to run again at the start of july, but wasn't fully healed so I stayed stopped again
By far my most consistent habbit. It helps how quickly I can fit it into a day, just need to find 10 min to dedicate to the practice.
This shows every day I logged anything at all. About 75% of the time I did at least 1 thing I consider productive (and logged it). Definatly room for improvement here. I had a really good streak from the end of march -> june. Then things started to get shakey for the rest of the year
These next stats should be taken with a grain of salt as I had a lot of issues getting google fit to sync with my watch.
Ideally the farther apart these 2 graphs the more walks I went on, or the slower my running pace was. I can say for sure after my shin splints I started going on much shorter runs and I never did get anywhere near my peak distance again
This was a good start to finally becoming a productive individual, but it's just a start. I'm hoping next year I can do even better, such as sticking to a diet longer, and not wavering in my schedule as much as I did. There were a lot of gaps where I really struggled to keep my momentum going, and starting over is much harder then to simply keep going. Next year I'm going to starting using Habitica to track my habits, since it has an API I can use to more easily download and view my progress on a more regular basis. I've also made many adjustments in what I'm tracking so that it's a more accurate representation of what I'm actually doing. It's a fine line between capturing meaningful data, and going overboard and making the act of tracking too difficult and leading to burnout which has been part of my problem in the past.
Overall a very productive year and I'm glad I went through this exercise. During the year it's hard to feel that your making any progress, be it fitness, education or your mindfulness practice. But when I was putting together this data I coul d really see how far I have come this year in many respects. I used to think that productivity was a function of either motivation, or discipline. And while bovth are certiantly nice to have they both have deeply flawed ways to be productive. Motivation can come in great burst and for a few days or weeks you can really push towards your goals. But motivation, like all emotions fades away. If that is all you are relying on you will burn out and find it difficult to get started again. Discipline is more durable then motivation, but it's one of those things where if you don't already have it, it's really hard to aquire. It's something that needs to be taught or given to you by some teacher or orginization like the military. Which finally leaves habits. Even if you completly lack all motivation or discipline you act out a series of habits, both good and bad. The trick is finding a way to make good habits easy and rewarding and bad habits hard and punishing. Again I recommend Atomic Habits, for more information on this topic.