How I use data to visualise my Life

I've always been amused by the thought that even though we have free-will in this world yet it is often so hard to follow through with long term goals.

I myself am more of a sprinter rather than a marathon runner and thus have fallen victim to the trap of many shiny objects on the side while trying to stay focused.

Lately I've been able to bring about a change by logging 2 items:

1. My Time
2. My Tasks

This has led me to obtain views into my life such as the following:

and to see changes in my activities per week

And also track specific goals where the blue line shows expected finish date assuming linear progress and the red line shows actual progress.

Now whenever I see myself slipping up or getting side tracked, I can take corrective actions and stay on track.

I'm also able to see time allocation for subcategories through data from my task manager and can then see the following visualisation

Questions that I can now answer

After tracking myself for roughly two months I've already been able to gather a large dataset and I can then answer interesting questions such as:

1. In which bucket of X days did my progress change more than Y% of my previous Z days progress
2. How much amount of X activity affects my Y activity i.e. how significant is the correlation between them
3. How far away is my projected date X of completing target number of hours for my activity from my target date Y which is Z months away
4. What is the minimum amount of hours needed for X activity to reach the target Y
5. How large was the impact of step S on the change of number of hours for activity X over days T after S
6. Am I constantly adding new issues In before first finishing old issues Io for time period t
7. Do the current % tasks completed per category Ccn and immediate open % tasks per Category Con match my previous Time span priority Pp and Current priority Cp for the relevant Category

Tools needed to achieve this

One to track my time called Multi-StoppUhr

And another to track my tasks called Things where for each task I give it a time bucket and category with easy keyboard shortcuts and then the results can be queried from their SQL database.

Ending Note

After setting up and automating most of the data ETL now I spend around 1 hour a week for inputting and analysing data, in contrast to some fears of my friends who upon seeing this think that data entry is all that I do now.

I now have an insight into my life from an outer lens and it is shocking to see how different the length of time I was actually spending on various things compared to what I thought. Also, if I want to increase the amount of time and effort in a certain category I would be able to have a view whether it actually took place.

If anyone is interested in wanting to know deeper or has any suggestion feel free to send me a message :)