Life Tracker

Background

I've always liked the idea of keeping a journal, but I wish it could be easier. Putting my thoughts and feelings on paper not only makes them more real to me, but also gives me a chance to reflect on what happened and make decisions for the day to follow. My problem, as I've mentioned before, is that I hate writing. I have a difficult time coming up with the adjectives that accurately describe what I'm feeling and thinking. The time it takes to actually write the words down feels like wasted time, and I don't really enjoy the physical process of writing, I rather abhor it. Finally, even when I get started on a journal, I have a really hard time remembering to stick with it night after night. I think most of my ideas come from my laziness.

 

 The Idea

What if there were a way that I could have a journal without having to sit down and write everything out, and without having to remember to do it every single night? Maybe I could set an alarm that goes off every night to remind me to write? And as long as I'm going to use technology, why don't I type my journal instead? In fact, why don't I just have the computer send me an email that asks me stuff every night, and all I have to do is answer the questions? And what if I could customize the questions? I could track personal goals, feelings, health, wellness, physical fitness, relationships, pretty much anything important that I might want to track on a regular basis. A web form could be used to simplify the entries as much as possible, then spit out an entry using "normal language" (computer-generated).

Now I've got all this data that could easily live in a database. I might as well do something useful with it and apply some statistics to try and find correlations. Does my mood shift seasonally? Is my blood-sugar or well-being affected by my diet? Do I really struggle with meeting my physical fitness goals based on the temperature outside? By drawing correlations the computer can flag me of associations that I should look into. Knowing yourself is one step to improving yourself.

It should all be part of a website with associated mobile apps. You get to choose everything. Notification method (email or app), times, types of questions to fill out. There would have to be a big list of options, and efficient way to present them (maybe a dichotomy). It would be subscription based, and there would be a separate section for analytics.

And of course there must be a script that recommends other adjectives based on the ones you type.

 

Progress

 12/12/2014 - Sometime last year I actually sat down and created a USB drive with a mobile server and WordPress installed. I spent a week trying to figure out the backside of WordPress and decided I hated the whole thing. If I'm going to build a site myself then I'll probably need to write it from scratch. My questions is whether I should invest the time to learn PHP or just stick with ColdFusion. There is probably better front-end support for PHP, but that's a time investment.

I wiped the USB drive and will start fresh with PHP and MySQL. Maybe I should pay someone to help me get started?