I put my whole life into a single database

The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable:

> Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.

The whole "qualified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.

In my experience, tracking objective things like "nutrition" and "sleep hours" is immensely useful to reflect on what went wrong, and tracking subjective things like "mood" or "stress" is useless given hedonic adaptation or heavy swings that make problems obvious, and not need tracking.

What's key is be able to visualize metrics easily on the data and frictionless data entry, I've got a decent setup with iPhone Action + Obsidian + QuickAdd scripts on Obsidian Sync (mobile + laptop). for visualization I use Obsidian Bases and Obsidian notes that run Dataview code blocks and Chart.js, couldn't be happier.

I could track things that are not interesting to reflect on like vitamin D supplementation for accountability but I've never bothered, especially if it's taken ~daily.

An interesting experiment, I think I'm too uncomfortable leaking data I don't yet know why someone would curate to me free of charge until I knew. If there was a FOSS suite like Home Assistant that would do a few of those things I might try it out, especially the weather (I would add air quality) correlation to mood and other subjective states.

I get that everyone wants to be cynical about this, but you really can't deny that both the visualization and sheer scale of data is impressive. The way the "my life in weeks" is done is also very cool, I'll be stealing that for myself.

This was far more interesting than I first thought it would be when clicking the link. In particular, the place/time and life events and such being presented this way told a story and was fun.

This might sound harsh but for someone who is keen on investing time to track so many things, you should invest some time in learning how to make better visualizations. A few tweaks here and there would really improve what you have.

Taking “Know thyself” to a whole new level. I’d love to have these stats on me, if it could be done by inference, rather than conscious effort.

I wonder how much time you spend daily on tracking things / data entry

I definitely see the appeal, but I can’t help feeling it’s the same trap we fall into with product data and telemetry. So much of what we collect ends up being noise; my worry is that if we dig through enough of it, we’ll eventually talk ourselves into seeing a pattern that isn't actually there.

I’ve started applying this to my personal life by using Memos (https://usememos.com/ - OSS and selfhosted) for tweet style journaling and only tracking outlier data for sleep, fitness, and health. What over tracking and over planning taught me is that anything normal is effectively just noise. If the data isn't an anomaly, it isn't actionable.

So it didnt end up working too well seeing that the latest data is from 4 years ago.

Yeah, we've all put our whole lives into a single database. It's called the United States Government.