creature of habit log

June 29, 2006 10:51 AM

What web app will help me to track my daily routines such as what I eat, what I spend money on, exercise, watching too much TV vs. reading, biking to work vs driving, etc.?

I've looked at some of the diet/exercise type applications but they all seem to be limited to just that: diet and exercise. I want something that goes a step further and tracks things like watching TV vs. reading or playing on the computer after work when I should be giving my poor hands a break. While I'm mainly interested in historic data and creating reports from it the ability to set goals for certain actions would certainly be useful. Some type of blog/journal function would also be useful so I have a place to ramble about what I'm doing or not doing each day.

With the popularilty of 'lifehacking' and Getting Things Done it seems that someone has already created such a tool but I just haven't found it yet.

A few years ago there was something kinda like this released by www.k10k.net I think, though I'm unable to remember what it was called or find it on their site.

posted by J-Garr to computers & internet (13 comments total)

The K10K thing was MoodStats. It's done by the same people, Cuban Council.
posted by matthewr at 10:56 AM on June 29, 2006

I don't know as it's precisely what you're looking for, but I do think it's in the ballpark: Joe's Goals.
posted by WCityMike at 10:56 AM on June 29, 2006

Also, I guess Excel would work perfectly well for this, although it's a bit short on AJAX and rounded corners.
posted by matthewr at 10:57 AM on June 29, 2006

Trackslife would let you set up online spreadsheets to track whatever you want, but looking at the previous suggestions, I like those better.
posted by tastybrains at 11:07 AM on June 29, 2006

WCityMike, thanks for that link! What a cool one. I'm using it right away.
posted by agregoli at 11:11 AM on June 29, 2006

I've played with Joe's Goals... I just wish it were ever so slightly more flexible.

I guess what I'd really like is Joe's Goals-esque functionality packaged into something like SparkPeople.
posted by Tacos Are Pretty Great at 11:29 AM on June 29, 2006

In the ballpark:

Remember the Milk
Backpack
HipCal
posted by mattbucher at 11:52 AM on June 29, 2006

Won't help you with the blog, but Google Spreadsheets seems the easiest for just data storage.
posted by andifsohow at 3:08 PM on June 29, 2006

I did this with a simple Python script -- every time it runs it opens up a terminal window and asks me to enter something. Then that string I enter is timestamped and sent to an SQL database. I then either have an icon for this program on my taskbar so it's very accessible, or have the script launch every x hours and go to sleep after i enter my text.
posted by lunchbox at 3:58 PM on June 29, 2006

Thanks for all the links everyone. I'll be trying out each of them over the long weekend to see if I can find something resembling a winner. Remember the Milk is promising but I may end up just using google spreadsheets.

I was looking around to see if people are making interesting things with the google spreadsheets api and I discovered EditGrid which has its own api and a lot of features google doesn't have yet. Among others are the ability to post your spreadsheet to a blog. Have any of you experimented with editgrid yet?
posted by J-Garr at 4:20 PM on June 29, 2006

I'd second backpack - it may not seem like the obvious choice. But it's really versatile in terms of how it can be used.

Plus I love the fact that each page has an email address that I can mail things to (images, files, words). It means that with a bit of fooling around I can get stuff to my pages from a cellphone which is pretty cool.
posted by iaintait at 11:45 PM on June 29, 2006

a few things
- calorieking for exercise, weight, and meals
- you'll limit yourself by focusing on web apps. there's web-based storage if you need a centralized location for your data.
posted by Señor Pantalones at 10:12 AM on June 30, 2006

I asked this a while back to not much effect.

I was using reger.com at the time, which seems to meet most of your criteria, though I found it rather clunky and the graphs inaccurate.

I ended up rolling my own, using a simple php script and the Sparkline PHP Library.
posted by joshwa at 6:07 PM on July 1, 2006