“It is true enough that not every conceivable complex human situation can be fully reduced to the lines on a graph, or to percentage points on a chart, or to figures on a balance sheet, but all reality can be reasoned about. And not to quantify what can be quantified is only to be content with something less than the full range of reason.” — Robert McNamara

What you see is some of the daily data I’ve collected during 8 years of my life (2,863 days between 01/03/2014 and 01/01/2022) charted as basically as possible in order to allow global readings and comparisons. (A nice method is just to scroll up and down with the mouse cursor pointing to the time of interest.) I continue to log my data but haven’t updated the visualization since 2022. I also have a lot more data on medical issues, people I meet, and daily activities, which I chose not to show here.

How do I collect all this data? I don’t use motion/sleep/… trackers. I’m not comfortable with wearables and smartphones. All it takes is a few minutes of retrospective question answering on Reporter (on my iPad) when I wake up and go to bed every day (+ Last.fm for songs). With this method, whereas a few scalar topics have well-defined scales in terms of numbers (sleep hours, medicine, socialization, songs listened), most of them (stress, work, physical activity, etc.) are logged with approximate values defined in my head such as “0: none, 1: very few, 2: normal, …”. I’m not interested in the absolute values of things; I want to see patterns of increase/decrease, and the correlations between topics.