Primer
I'm working on a time machine, going to release it later this year.
I strongly believe the most powerful meaning we can get out of life is a theme.
A theme that holds everything together, a story we can tell, progress & memories we can recall.
These are the type of things that are going to be here when we’re old.
These are the type of things that are going to be here when we’re gone.
Think about it: the most permanent thing we have today is the internet. An infrastructure that 25 years ago nobody knew nothing about, now holds all of our identities, collective knowledge & external brains. And it's only getting stronger; with new versions, intelligent capabilities, decentralization and cloud distribution. When I first got enrolled in a formal computer science degree, I didn't quite see all of this. Not because I was just getting started, but because 9 years ago we really didn't have what we have today; I've eventually come to learn that even if 9 years ago I was mastering some niche/toolset/tech stack, it's probably totally out of date now. So it wouldn't really make a difference as to when did I start. Which makes me feel super lucky to engage at right about these times; times that I imagine will forever be of great significance.
Journaling
I'm working on a tool you can use to hop at any day in your life and instantly remember how you were doing, who you were with, your physical & mental state, your biggest focus, your soundtrack, and how you spent your time.
If you think about it, the "journal" premise is just about the same. A journal or a diary is trying to help you have control over your days and be more mindful when it comes to the lingering, the changes, & the progress. A journal is essentially trying to associate every new stimulus with a result, like one big monitor where you are performing an infinite amount of experiments, trials & errors, while learning about life, people and yourself in the process.
Journaling is one activity that pays most dividends over time, it helps your understand yourself and it helps you grow everyday. Now that's good & all, but what's not good, and what really stops me every time I'm trying to maintain a journal is: Friction. Maintaining a journal is a high-friction habit. Meaning in order to be effective, it needs to be a part of your day everyday, and you have to dedicate the headspace and manually do the writing, whether digital or analog. And even for digital journals, the maximum streak I could ever maintain was about 3 months, after which I get caught in life, and never continue.
Time as a concept
I believe time is the most important concept among all concepts.
And reality is I find the most meaning in connecting events & progress embedded in the tinniest stretches of time. And I also discovered that I might be into that because of the way I bounced back from the toughest times of my life, & looking back on how we long changed.
In my experience, time also proves to do good when I give it the opportunity.
The time I spend to go through my older journals can easily be some of the best moments of my life. Instantly you travel in time and see your older self talking to you now, literally like a handshake through time & space. You see yourself dreaming, talking to people, going places & envisioning where you'd want to be and what you're trying to achieve. When you do it from a place you dreamt about visiting, the handshake feels like a dream, because we tend to forget. We forget about what we dreamt of, and we forget our thoughts & aspirations. Our biological brains can't simply keep a log of every thought or dream you have every day. But an external one can, if you can fight friction and be dedicated enough to write everyday. BUT, this wasn't me. I didn't journal everyday.
A Search Engine for your life activity: Keep a memory of everything
So, given that we don't like friction but we also need to remember our days, I was thinking about the ways we normally default to when we try to remember a specific day. That's a good exercise, give yourself a minute to think, what do you normally do to remember a given day? Maybe check your photos app? a quick search with the day/month in iOS/Google photos gives you a view with the photos you took that day, what else? You open your instagram story archive maybe? Your WhatsApp chats? Is there any other prominent way to remember a day?
In my efforts to answer this question, I spent lots of time trying to make tech work for me.
The end goal: To be able to remember what & how I was doing, thinking and performing on any specific day.
I tried to use apps & methods that can help me manually log several aspects of my life and through which I can search and hop back at any point in time.
I don't want to go through all the experiments I did through the past few years, but, put together, I found out there were several levels to self-tracking:
- Level 1
- Apps/Services that enable you to track & search your timeline for just 1 aspect:
- Trackers: tracking sleep, tracking workouts, tracking finances, tracking location history, tracking screentime
- Events: integrate all events & meetings into one calendar that I can search/view
- Notes: put a date on my notes, link them together when I can
- Music: spotify activity & stats services
- Manual entries: mood, energy level, nutrition data (myfitnesspal, etc)
- Advantage: You can find accurate info about any day easily just by opening & searching the respective app.
- Disadvantage: Lots of apps to use everyday! Easy to get lost between different data, high friction!
- Level 2
- Automate different functions:
- Save health data (sleep, workouts, steps) for everyday into an excel sheet automatically
- Save my location history data & spotify activity to the same sheet automatically
- Sync all my notes, reading highlights and web highlights in a folder on my disk automatically
- Sync my computer & phone screentime as well as activities I'm working on, automatically
- Sync my favorite photos of each day (from iOS favs) to the cloud, and then to a database, automatically
- Advantage: Easy to maintain, minimal friction, lots of automation tools and free APIs to help you.
- Disadvantage: Extremely technical! In order to build & maintain a system like this, you have to be more than tech-savvy. You have to find your way around writing scripts, exploring API docs & building pipelines.
- Level 3
- Centralize your life activity into one timeline: One view that is not only bound to places, categories or areas, just a timeline with everything on top of it, zero-to-low friction, select a day in the time machine to instantly view information about your body, mind & memories.
- View aggregated stats about your days, weeks, months & years. Like Spotify wrapped. Do you know why people love Spotify wrapped and wait to see it every year? Because it's all happening in the background and they just trust that there's an automated report through which they can know themselves better.
- Dive deep into any of the tracked stuff. Ditch the high-level and take a closer look into that journal, that workout, that meal or that outing from 2 years ago.
- Principles:
- Everything is as automated as possible (through integrations)
- User has full control over data (via exports and/or APIs)
- Aimed for the non-techies, zero technical experience needed
- UI components are interactive whenever possible
- Not a:
- Habit tracking app
- Fitness app
- Notes app
- More like a:
- Automated journal
- Decision-making helper
- Advantages:
- Almost everything is automated, checks our initial goal of "instant time travel"
- Track activities, run experiments & make smarter decisions
- Holistic view about your digital & physical self
- Monitor everything about your mind & body in one place
Age of the Quantified Self
There’s a rumor Apple is releasing an aggregator app for the next iOS that gathers data from Apple Health, calendar events & phone calls → into an automated journal.
In light of this, we’re on the verge of witnessing a new approach to journaling, mainly because:
- Data is so loud: e.g It’s no longer the case that doctors are the only ones who can listen to the data our bodies are radiating
- Data is so personal: Not every health tip is applicable to you & me. Readings often tell us insights that are often not so general, but rather highly specific to our case
- Behavioral modification means we can remove the training wheels after enough time & they will still maintain that enriched life that this tech enabled
- We’re only using 10% of our capabilities → Future is different, it’s time we think of tech as a way of expanding our humanness
Promises of self-tracking:
- To be more mindful of our bodies
- To be more aware of the surroundings affecting our lives
- To be more present
Which leads to us becoming better humans, better athletes, better caretakers, better lovers, better professionals, and better friends.