I've been tracking data about my habits every day for the last 2 years.
This sounds a lot more “control freak” when written than it did in my head, but, to be honest, at the beginning, it was indeed a super freak thing.
Around October 2023, I created the "Vital” project. The idea was to track and monitor daily the execution of a series of habits, together with my "overall” mood throughout the year of 2024. Alongside that, of course, was an over-elaborate plan about how I would optimize every second of my day to account for all the related goals (that I quantified,by the way). Things that I, as every human being in capitalism, struggle to keep simultaneously: 5 days of exercise per week, quality meals, 8 daily hours of sleep, daily skin care, reading, etc.
Unnecessary to say: the whole plan failed in the first 3 or 4 months. A series of tough projects at work, struggles with anxiety, dropping immunity, and adult life in general drained my energy and commitment. Also, as my therapist pointed out, probably the amount of mental and emotional energy that the whole plan needed was much higher than any positive result that all the habits together would bring, so the "math was not mathing”
But, curiously, the habit of feeding the spreadsheet itself stuck throughout this time, religiously, although I refused to analyse anything at any moment of these 2 years, until now.
I haven't tought a lot about it, but I feel like the reason might be similar to the result I felt when I started to track all my daily expenses, almost 3 years ago (another personal over-controlling project): even before doing any kind of analysis, the fact of stoping for 5 minutes every day and going thought my expenses made a little more conscious about money in general. And of course, eventually became a dash, projections, and some valuable savings and learnings, besides avoiding some mess-ups along the way.So where does that lead me? Nowhere specifically, actually. After a long and crazy year, I'm still refusing to optimize anything (especially physical exercise, this one is done…).
But with 2 years of personal data (and counting), I decided to use this as an excuse to take another goal from the drawer: go back to building visualizations just for fun. So I did a series of visuals exploring my struggle with some of those habits over this time, felt cute.
At least now I have these sort of poster/Infographic to remind me that progress takes time, patience, and a bit of self-compassion mixed with tolerance to failure.
And maybe I could have a column to "Build a graph today?”. We'll see.
