23Oct05 | Hyperspaces FAQs

One of the things I learned over the past few years is that documenting my life is generally one of the best practices for good living. There has always been a direct correlation between how often & how deep I document and the overall sense of control & happiness I have in my life.

In order to document I need to do 2 things – Write & Track:

• Write about recent events & updates – For future reflection
• Track different aspects about my lifestyle & performance

When I first started doing this, I was trying to do both separately & independently, each in its own context. I was using different apps & tools to achieve that.

And then with time I would find it extremely hard to keep up, considering the amount of things I want to document, and the overwhelm I’m already experiencing due to life & work. I don’t want another burden through my day-to-day, yet I can’t just give up on the idea.

So along the years I kept experimenting with different systems searching for a sustainable one that can minimize that type of effort, and that can potentially outlive me.

In January of this year, I started working on https://hyperspaces.live/ – A tool that enables Writing & Tracking baked into one interface.

What does this mean?

It means that whenever I’m not doing anything, several aspects about my life experiences are already being recorded in the background – And then when the time comes for me to write, I’d find several clues that I call “Timeline Items” on top of which I can write my journal.

This approach:

1. Turns “Journaling” from starting on a blank canvas to being half-way there
2. Removes the burden of even having to write, if you can’t keep up – Because you still have a detailed log of your life activity

What exactly is “life activity”?

The definition of life activity may differ from someone to another, but the things that you & I have in common when it comes to life activity are:

• Where have we been?
• What were we doing on screen, if any?
• What physical activity were we doing, if any?

These are the basis for any physical experience that could be digitalized, and then we may have some items that enhance those: People, Photos, Digital Logs, Music, etc.

Now there’s no item mentioned that is not already available in some form on your devices. What Hyperspaces is about is to bring them into context – Where you have everything front & clear, in a seamlessly connected interface, and then from here on you can zone in and add more thoughts about what’s most valuable for you.

We’re working to roll it out soon.

If interested to give it a try when it’s here, you can submit your email in the form on the website, or the form below this post.

So far my journals for the past few months have been the most detailed and with the least effort. For example, I had 700 tracked timeline items for the month of September, which subsequently helped me journal about 72 of them.

So at end of the month, I found I wrote 72 different notes about things that happened in my life during that month – Which I can frankly say is more than I ever did in a month.

For me, this means:

• A detailed journal about days & items
• No more multiple apps & tools
• I can summarize stats about my physical activity & fitness: Workouts, Sleep, & Nutrition
• I can compare stats over time & track progress
• Since I have 100% of the data about timestamps & places, I can link all items that happened in parallel – For example: My photos are automatically connected to my locations, because I have both data in the same place
• I can easily answer the questions “How often did I …” or “When was the last time I …”
• I can search about anything I have done, or a place I was at, or a thought I have written down, and then expand to view more context
• I can view a map of the locations I was at during the month, week, or custom

To give a rough idea about what’s under the hood, this is a sample screenshot for some auto-tracked items during weekdays in September:

and another one during a weekend:

1. Advanced Search → “Assistant”

Since all data about my life activity is already there, there’s an obvious case for me asking questions about my past and then a powerful Search Engine could process that and answer my questions in an easy interface – But let’s not call it AI yet – Because an AI layer on top of this type of data can do much more than this, which I gave a hint about before, but will address later in more detail.

So advanced search will enable asking about any of my memories in natural language and getting answers on the spot – Via an Assistant interface.

2. Advanced Data Representation → “Insights”

The main problem with current fitness dashboards is they are either too complex to use or they have a bunch of metrics that we are rarely interested in. This problem is persistent with almost all dashboards! They feel like presets.

End-user shouldn’t feel like a prisoner of specific data representation, but rather would like to customize the way their data is presented, and in a way that is not complex nor technical. Not only that, but we are also different, and it’s normal that we have different preferences. That’s why better data representation is a priority.