One of the nice things about following people online is that sometimes they give you an entirely new reason to follow them. So it was with Fractal Kitty. I came for strangely wonderful crochet and then discovered her journaling habits and processes, which made me think about mine.

First off, I don’t track many of the things she does, and she doesn’t say anything about tracking some of the things I do. I love birds, and can identify a few, but I’m no bird watcher. Up here on the terrace, it’s sparrows all the way, with lots of wood pigeons, hooded crows, herring gulls and escapee hybrid parakeets. I could surely add more by sitting still in the park nearby, but the park is mostly for walking, not sitting. So, no point, for me, though I probably get some of the same benefits from noticing and sometimes noting plant phenology.

Rather than go through Fractal Kitty’s categories one by one (TIL Cinquain) my thoughts are on what to do with the stuff. My data are all over the place. Distances for active movement in Apple Activities (with Overland for backup and motorised transport); bodily measurements in Apple Health; garden stuff mostly in Day One, along with anything else of note (recently, crochet); baking in a tatty, cheap paper notebook; keyboard activities in Tyme3; a limited set of did I or not activities in a custom-built Shortcut; plans planned and achieved in a natty, costly paper notebook. Et cetera, et cetera.

Once a month, once a quarter, and once a year, I do my best to at least summarise and occasionally interpret some of that, but the process is a patchwork of cobbled together scripts, written routines, and happenstance. So I was envious of Fractal Kitty’s Implementation section.

• I would say that running the script and committing take less than 2 minutes.
• Most of my time is spent writing and logging - which is how I want my journal to work.

I’m the reverse of that. Recording the things, especially the quantifiable things, takes almost no time and very little effort. I have to remember to start and stop recording, and occasionally forget, but inaccuracy is a small price to pay for convenience. But each month, quarter, year I spend far too much time extracting and massaging the raw data into a form of information, and that’s despite the cobbled together scripts and notes.

For a brief moment, I thought about turbo-charging all that, and dug into automated data retrieval from Tyme3. It certainly can be done, but is it worth doing? Not for me, because looking at the dashboard, writing down 5 or 6 numbers and transferring those to by hand to files works just fine and really is not a chore. Processing cycling distance takes longer, mostly dumping the necessary from Apple Health. But I can make coffee while that’s happening, so I think, for now, I’m good with what I’ve got, even if it does sometimes seem like a “waste” of time.

As for deep insights, not really. I like being notified of what Apple weirdly calls a trend, but which is actually a step change in some kind of moving average, and sometimes I do something about it. I like seeing what a waste of money my car is in the greater scheme of moving about under power, though I don’t do anything about that.

The greatest reward, though, is at the end of each day, when I record anything notable in Day One. Not the recording itself, but knowing that future me will be able to look back and remind himself of the trivia of quotidian life on that day in years past, just as I remind myself today.