Create a Great Data Visualization Workbook About Everything You Do in a Year With the Gyroscope App
Android, iOS. You may be right when you look at applications or services that promise to “track your entire life” with suspicion. What does the company do with this data? Do you really need something to catalog every place you go, every photo you take, and every mood you feel?
I still disagree with this practice, and lately I’m not very familiar with Facebook for this very reason. But if you’re still looking for a great way to capture most of what you do every day, consider the free Gyroscope app for Android and iOS .
Gyroscope’s premise is simple: you plug in a bunch of services and enable all sorts of tracking features on your device, and the app automatically extracts that data to create interesting graphs of everything you’ve been doing.
This piece of “tracking” sounds ominous – and unintentional, but that ‘s what the Gyroscope will do. It can show you which places you have visited (if you let your smartphone provide that information to it), and it can even go so far as to give you a pretty decent guess about how you got to where you were. going, whether it’s walking, subway, driving and so on.
I especially like a few things about the gyroscope. Firstly, the app has a great user interface and you can also access all tracked statistics online and even share your life story (for lack of a better phrase) with others. The great thing is that Gyroscope can connect to desktop apps like RescueTime, which can give you an idea of when you were productive at your desk and when you weren’t doing anything important at all. The app also encourages you to get into your mood at any time and track your ups and downs throughout the year.
The app requires a subscription to access its “professional” features, which include a comprehensive analysis of your entire data history; integration with services such as Runkeeper, Last.fm and 23 & me; sleep tracking; and goal setting.
There is also one big unique benefit to becoming a subscriber – for about $ 70 a year. Do this, and every year you will have the opportunity to print a great, beautiful hardcover report on everything you have done. This annual report will cost you an extra $ 299, but is individually wrapped, labeled, printed on thick silk paper in a hardcover book, has great visuals on the inside (including maps of your travels) and is customizable (especially if you prefer a particular accent color) …
The book is a big investment even for data hobbyists, but it’s a great way to remember your year, especially if you’ve had a lot to do (or tracked all the statistics you could come up with with the app). While you can track your life with a variety of apps, including those preinstalled on your smartphone, I have yet to see a service that offers such a neat physical product to buy and does a great job with all the major components. from your life.
Do you have an iOS or Android app that you really like? Leave a note in the comments or email me: david.murphy@lifehacker.com .