The only data tracking that works is incidental and pervasive

I’ve never taken to most of the various tracking apps. I’ve never really taken to posting most forms of this sort of data to my blog either. I think it’s quite fun to track things and have data about patterns. And of course, data about things like the media I watch can be quite helpful for discovering new things.

But I don’t find the process of tracking to be fun– in fact, I find it tedious. For tracking to work in my life, it has to be both incidental and pervasive. Anything short of this is too hard to maintain and too incomplete to be useful.

My Apple Watch tracks a lot of health data in a way that is both incidental and pervasive. Last.fm used to be that way for music, kind of, except that so much my listening happened on physical media, and then, transitioned to various streaming services and phones and lots of places where scrobbling wasn’t quite so easy or reliable. Yesterday, I wrote about some spending patterns supported by Copilot (affiliate link, my code is DW49GR to get 2 months free). This only works because I almost exclusively use cash for haircuts and the occasional lotto ticket, so all of my spending is available digitally.

There’s some tracking I will make a little bit of effort for. I track my reading (and even do so on my blog). Almost all of my reading is on a Kindle, in part because of bad eyesight. It has a strong Goodreads integration, and even though I hate the Goodreads service, I can’t quite my preferred Literal or Storygraph to stick because there’s just too much manual intervention. If I’m going to put in that work, I’ll do it on my blog. ¹ When I read a physical book ² and complete it, it’s fairly easy to fill in somewhere.

Tracking movies and TV has just never worked. The watching ecosystem is far too fractured, there’s no interest in sharing data or my getting ownership of my own data, too much of the important stuff has been watched before tools were available, and too much of what I watch I watch casually. The idea of this becoming either incidental or pervasive isn’t even a hope– it seems impossible to get there from here.

The one thing I keep struggling to track is where I eat. One of the best things I did consistently for our few months in Mexico was take a picture at every restaurant. I then added those photos to Day One, which added date, time, and location to every photo. When I remembered, I’d even name the post after the restaurant. I have an incredible map of everywhere we ate those few months and I can see the meals we had. I still do this occasionally when we travel, but never with the same consistency or zeal. I can give restaurant recommendations in most of the US, almost entirely on the back of the map view in Apple Photos. I really love having these reminders of restaurant meals and places I’ve spent time. But even just remembering take a picture, which I can add to Day One at any time, is just not incidental enough to make this a consistent practice. It’s the one form of logging I wish I’d could hold on to that never fully sticks.