Metrics

I've been trying to get a bit more serious about self-measurement lately, but I keep running into the complete lack of decent tooling. I have a few projects in the works that might make things a bit easier, at least for me, but all the same it's strange that the state of things is so primitive. It's particularly puzzling because so many nerds I know seem to be really interested in it.

Honestly the only explanation that seems to make sense is this: Firstly, most people only care about tracking calories. Secondly, most people outside the first category don't have the resources to do anything but try to subsist on an ungodly diet of spreadsheets and IFTTT. Thirdly, the tiny remainder of people who do care and can do something are all falling over each other in a manic land grab for a platform to own and sell literally every piece of information ever recorded about you. If you listen carefully at night you can hear them salivating all across the Valley.

Anyway, none of the purpose-built stuff seems to suit, so I'm investigating what I can get done with my old standby, the devops/monitoring toolchain. It's massively overpowered for this, but, hey, better than underpowered. The graph pictured here is Grafana plus InfluxDB showing a plot of my working hours per week by category.

I'm pretty impressed at how much insight I could get from that relatively quickly. The green line is me slowly ramping up my creative output and backing off last week because I overdid it a bit. The yellow line spiked up because I wanted to spend more time walking and thinking, and you can see the blue line hovering around 5-10 hours, which is mostly spent writing here.