Re: Org-mode as a Quantified Self platform

[Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at>]

Hi!

* John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've really been getting into the Quantified Self movement recently,

Same holds to me. I just wanted to post almost the same things you
did. :-)

> and by "getting into," I mean reading and watching videos and
> /thinking/ about things I'd like to track about myself. [1] I've been
> pondering what kind of "platform" to use for my data collection...
> Excel? Some time tracking application? Those were after-thoughts. I
> thought of Org-mode right away and it seemed like an obvious choice.

I chose Org-mode before I got into QS. And it seems to me an almost
perfect match.

> -- 

Sidemark: double-dash followed by a space will be interpreted as the
start of your signature. At least in my newsreader (ML->Gmane) your
posts consists of /awful/ long signatures :-)

> Has anyone done something like this? 

I did not /plan/ my QS/Org-mode setup thoroughly (yet):

I am using habits to track some things that re-appear within five
weeks or less. 

For tracking events, I am using todos that repeat every 20 years or
so. Those todos I mark as done whenever an event occurs. This
results in drawers like:

:LOGBOOK:
- State "DONE"       from "TODO"       [2011-10-05 Wed 00:16]
- State "DONE"       from "TODO"       [2011-09-24 Sat 15:27]
- State "DONE"       from "TODO"       [2011-09-08 Thu 08:49]
- State "DONE"       from "TODO"       [2011-08-05 Fri 08:35]
- State "DONE"       from "TODO"       <2011-07-03 Sun 14:28>
:END:

I admit that I did not know about org-collector.el before this
thread. I will definitely look into that as well.

I do not have anything useful for analyzing or visualizing Org-mode
data yet. If org-collector.el does not turn out to be the solution,
I plan to write my own Org-mode parser in Python. My brain is not
«compatible» with LISP, I'm afraid.

When I've got the time stamps in Python, I can do whatever I like.

I'd love to see an Android app for quick input. Mobile Org for
Android has to much overhead for this purpose. I want to have an app
that I can start and touch one single button when I want to log a
timestamp of an event. Optionally it should ask me for a
text/number/amount. It'd be perfect when this QS-app is providing
widgets so that I can put such «event XY happened»-icons on the main
screen to be able to quickly log any event. One button type for each
event I want to capture.

I played around with Android apps that try to log my position using
WiFi network, cell triangulation, or GPS. They all had their issues.
Bad luck so far. (LifeLogger, GPSLogger, ...)

> -- On that note, what's the best way to get data out of
> org-habit/headlines and into something a bit more usable like csv? 

Sorry, nothing I know of so far.

But something very nice I already did: Memacs[2]

With Memacs, you can get many different data sources back into your
possession, back into your agenda: emails, tweets, bookmarks,
git-commits, text messages, phone calls, photographs, usenet
postings, and so forth will appear in your agenda. I do like Memacs
a *lot*. 

Once you have set up Memacs, it runs by its own and provides a diary
that writes itself :-) Every Memacs-user reported very positive
aspects she/he did not think of this before so far.

I plan to write that Python-Parser also to fetch Memacs-data and
generate (general) visualizations like:
* events per day/week/month/year
* average time between events
* ...

  2. https://github.com/novoid/Memacs
-- 
Karl Voit