Beautiful life tracker app?

September 5, 2020 2:51 AM

I have a weakness for paper life planners, schemes such as "Level 10 Life" which encourage you to set goals in various life areas, and habit tracker apps. Is there an attractive app which will allow me to monitor how my daily habits and activities aggregate and contribute to my goals?

I'd love to eg. look over the last month's calendar and see in (a colour coded?) way that I spent 20 hours working on creative projects but haven't called my relatives in two weeks.

I find I am happiest when achieving a balance between various hobbies and areas of life but my exact habits fluctuate during the year and as I prioritise different things so I'd ideally like to capture the sense that both planning trips for my friends and calling my sister add together to improve my "relationships" category, rather than purely tracking individual habits.

I'd also be interested to see any related resources, journalling prompts etc.

Thanks!

posted by limoncello to Health & Fitness (8 answers total)

Well I have a journal from Sacred
Ordinary Days and it has a weekly focus on how are your relationships, or resources, your health? I use it how you mention here, to focus on goal setting for relationship as well as work. Each day has you reflect and set three priorities and three rests.

It is very Christian focused though, so that might not be your cup of tea.
posted by aetg at 5:00 AM on September 5, 2020

Best answer: I use an app called “Super Habit” to track individual daily goals. For example, I track the number of days I’ve practiced watercolor painting in 2020. The app shows that I’ve painted on 97 days since April 15 (when I started using the app). I can see my current streak as well. The app is pretty minimalist and has nice color coding options.
posted by katie at 7:24 AM on September 5, 2020

Best answer: I use Daylio, which is easy to customize for your activities and moods. It doesn't really allow you to track based on amount of time spent, but has some nice aggregate visuals.
posted by ellerhodes at 8:46 AM on September 5, 2020

Best answer: I thought Fabulous was very pretty and clear, and boy is it willing to work on all my habits at once. That was more totalizing than I was up for, and it’s $50 a year, but I still remember the aesthetics so give it a look.

I fussed around a bit color-coding my tasks in Todoist so now the “done this week” bar gives me some sense of balance or imbalance. Definitely it reflects that “ both planning trips for my friends and calling my sister add together to improve my "relationships". ” Otherwise more efficient than aesthetic.

Some of the focus apps similarly color code what you were focusing on, for a chart of time rather than tasks - Forest, NoxOcean. Those are designed for an aesthetic reward for not futzing with your phone, so they’re pretty.
posted by clew at 10:23 AM on September 5, 2020

Best answer: Have at look at (mefi's own?) exist.io.

It hooks into your various other info sources as well as letting you have manual tags and then gives you interesting and useful correlation data.

So I can see that I sleep more on days where I did a lot of work or I am less happy when I tweet more.
It also records and cross references weather data and mood and all sorts of things.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:19 PM on September 5, 2020

Best answer: For that kind of breakdown, I use Timeneye to get a sense of my time breakdown - I've basically set up projects by different parts of my life (so work is one colour, social stuff is another, religious stuff is another, writing time, etc.)

The logging is pretty straightforward: I leave a tab with it open all the time and just add things as relevant. (I don't generally log random email time, or reading web stuff, or whatever, but if I wanted to, it'd be easy.)
posted by jenettsilver at 6:53 PM on September 5, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks for the leads! I'm leaning towards exist.io but enjoying researching these options.
posted by limoncello at 4:17 AM on September 6, 2020

Life Cycle is an app that pulls data from other sources on your phone and shows how you have spent your time.
posted by pixiecrinkle at 10:29 AM on September 8, 2020