Day 1

I've mentioned here once, or maybe a few times, that I've been thinking about experimenting with quantifying more of my life. My activity tracker already records a great deal; steps taken, calories burned, heart rate, etc. I've noticed that being aware of those numbers drives me to attain the goals set for them; going out on walks, even rather late in the evening, to achieve my steps for the day, or controlling what I eat in order to stay at a desired weight. I also noticed that the display of consecutive days learning on the website teaching me spanish is a surprisingly powerful motivator to learn every day, at least a little bit. I'd also rather not be totally beholden to another company or person to track and record all this data.

So I started out yesterday by making a spreadsheet. It has various rows for tracking the sorts of things I'm interested in tracking. Some of them are health-related; weight, heart rate, blood pressure, that sort of thing. Others are performance-related; reps on strength training exercises (tomorrow it goes up to 81!), whether I stretched that day or not, steps taken, etc. There is a separate tab for other exercises (I'll get to that). Dietary macros are tracked, along with water and fiber intake. I've also decided to add a column for whether or not I smoked that day; I quit some time ago, but the idea is amusing. I've also included a nap column. I came across the idea that all the sleep you need in a day is 6 hours at "night" (or whenever your sleep cycle usually is) and a 20-minute nap during the day. I may give something like that a try, but not right away. I don't want to change too much too soon.

So, for now, the goals are A. to start tracking various parameters using the spreadsheet, tweaking it as I go, B. to walk at least 10 kilometers (or 10,000 steps) each day (climbing at least 10 flights of stairs as I go), and C. to read (actually read, not listen to) at least 20 pages a day. That last goal isn't very ambitious, but that feeds into the next point; this is the first full day of the system. It's not perfect. For example, the function in the spreadsheet that tracks sleep assume your sleep cycle will span midnight; mine doesn't always do so. I may find that 20 pages a day is incredibly easy, or that 10 kilometers a day is too much of a time sink. But while this is meant to motivate me to improve, it's also important that I maintain a sense of perspective; I shouldn't go out running at quarter to midnight in a desperate attempt to get a few more steps in before midnight when I need to be awake and functional at 5 AM to bike to work. There need to be priorities, there needs to be perspective, and if I go weeks and weeks without missing a single metric...at least one of them is probably set too low.

Oh, the exercise tab. I'm interested in tracking a fair number of factors, mostly related to weather and clothing. It's getting cold here, quickly, and I have very little experience biking in the cold. Because I'm tracking so many, I made a separate tab just for exercises. It tracks such things as what sort of activity it was, when, how long it took, what I wore, etc. There are also notations for whether I was too cold, too hot, etc. Like the main page, I fully expect to make significant alterations to this one as I find what works well for me.

Three more quick things. One, I converted my running shoes back into screw shoes. Two, work and weather conspired to make my "rest week" more restful than it should have been; I missed my second swim AND my second run. Three, my experiment to make eggs in my electric kettle resulted, on the very first try, in the best hardboiled eggs I've ever made; 1 liter of room-temperature water in the kettle, add 4 eggs from the fridge, turn it on, and remove the eggs 10 minutes after the kettle turns itself off. The yolks were perfectly done with no overcooking. I'm very pleased.