Track your life during shelter-in-place, uncover bad habits, improve your health.

quarantine_life_tracking.md

Quarantine Life Tracker

TLDR; A gDocs-based approach for tracking your daily routines during shelter-in-place, helping you become aware of bad habits and setting goals to improve your physical and mental health while stuck at home.

Links to Google Docs:

• Data & Analysis Spreadsheet
• Evening Survey
• Morning Survey

What it is / Motivation

It started out with the realization that living in isolation started to take a toll on my general well-being:

• I felt my mental health starting to deteriorate
• Lack of motivation to do anything
• Increased alcohol and snack consumption
• Too little exercise and sleep
• The list goes on...

Something needed to be done. Since I live by myself, there was noone to hold me accountable to living a healthy life, so I started my own spreadsheet-version of a bullet journal. It was simple, easy and effective. Over time, it became more complex, but the basic idea is still the same:

1. Answer a few, simple questions every morning and every night
2. Collect and assemble data in a spreadsheet
3. Derive metrics and gain insight

How it works

• The forms feed data into two sheets called Morning Survey and Evening Survey
• Master Data sheet assembles the raw data into one table
• Metrics sheet cleans up the data and computes numerical values to serve a basis for analysis

How to use it

Disclaimer: I am neither a doctor nor a data scientist. This project should merley serve as an inspiration and makes no guarantees about correctness or accuracy.

The project grew organically and was not built with sharing in mind, so using it for your own purposes does involve some manual work:

1. Make copies of the Google spreadsheet and the two Google Forms
2. Edit the forms so that the responses feed into your spreadsheet
3. Rename the corresponding sheets to Morning Survey and Evening Survey and delete the ones containing the sample data
4. Make sure that the column mapping in Master Data (row 2) is correct.
5. Personalize forms and spreadsheets to track whatever you feel is important to you

I use IFTTT to send a push notification to my phone every morning and every night with a link to the respective Google form, which makes it much easier and convenient to collect the data.

Limitations

The spreadsheet relies on you filling out the surveys every day. No idea what happens if you don't. Here be dragons!

Ideas / Future Work

• Maybe turn it into an app if people like the idea
• Gamification, challenges, comparison with friends' progress