Save Data From Your Applications to a Spreadsheet
I use many different tools and apps to manage both my workflow and personal life: Airtable for scheduling, Toggl for time tracking, YNAB for budgeting, RescueTime for performance tracking, Fitbit for status tracking, and Exist for syncing and synthesizing data. which I get from other apps and establish relationships between activities and habits. (Believe it or not, Exist tells me that I’m more productive during the day when I don’t check my email after work. I’m also more productive when I consume more protein, whatever the cost.)
And then I have a table.
My spreadsheet stores most of the information collected by my applications – workflow, planning, finance, health, and more – in a document that I monitor and update myself.
I started developing this spreadsheet in 2013 and have been keeping records for the sixth year. The current version of the spreadsheet includes separate sheets for my daily schedule and workflow, my Getting Things Done to -do list, my finances, my meal planning, and my health.
Why am I maintaining a separate table in addition to all the applications that automatically collect data about my life, and why am I manually duplicating so much of this data in the table?
Because I’ve known for a long time that apps come and go. Companies are shutting down, characteristics are changing, products are being swept away in a different direction.
And while I’ve been here long enough to know that even personal recordings don’t last forever (ask me about the stack of CDs and floppy disks my current laptop isn’t meant to read), I’d rather deal with it. data rather than entrusting them completely to the application.
In the Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuels argues that while productivity apps can be great work management tools, we should also track our own data:
Even when it comes to manually copying and pasting your hard work into a set of spreadsheets, make sure there is a way to export your work, and try to do it regularly, if only as a backup.
While I realize that my current spreadsheet system will someday be as outdated and inaccessible as the tables I used to create in Microsoft Office 2000, they last much longer than some of the productivity apps recommended by Lifehacker in 2013. year.
So ask yourself if it’s time to start collecting your own data on your own systems, even if all you do is export files from your applications and save them in a folder labeled “MY DATA”.
And if you’ve also created your own custom life tracking spreadsheet, let us know!