Re: Org-mode as a Quantified Self platform

[Sacha Chua <sacha@sachachua.com>]

John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com> writes:

> 3) The habit family of features -- set up some initial goals
> (recurring todo headlines) and then just got to the headline and mark
> done (possibly with a note) to record the event.

org-agenda is a handy way of marking tasks as complete, too. I have an
Org subtree with my daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly routines, and
another section for "In case of..." lists that cover event-driven
routines.

> -- Has anyone done something like this? I see it as very similar to
> habit tracking. To give an example, I've had a bit of a persistent

I've been using Emacs and Ledger to keep track of my finances since
2005. I've also been tracking miscellaneous things (clothes, time, etc.)
on quantifiedawesome.com . I share my notes at
http://sachachua.com/blog/category/quantified . 

I often go back and use data from notes that I've taken using
org-capture. For example, if you set it to clock in and out
automatically, you can tell how long it takes to write a blog post. It's
easy to write a function that counts the words in a subtree and
calculates your WPM.

Effort / time elapsed information might also be very interesting for
self-tracking. You can use org-set-effort to estimate the time it takes
to complete a task, clock into a task when you start working on it, have
it clock out when you're done, and then check how accurate your
estimates are. Bonus: you get a modeline reminder of time elapsed vs
time estimated, and it turns a different colour when you go overtime.

I'm working on using org-contacts to quantify my social interactions
like the way that I was using BBDB to do so before.

I tracked e-mail interactions (# of days this message waited for a
reply, # of messages I've sent to people) when I used Gnus to do my
mail, but mail setup is a bit more complicated with Gmail and a Windows
system, so I haven't done this for a while.

I have some basic Emacs integration with QuantifiedAwesome - I can post
some records to my system from Emacs using the REST API. I've been
thinking about having it update my time tracking system when I clock in
and out of tasks, as that would be cool.

> -- I see I can insert [inactive] timestamps in mobile-org. Making
> something a TODO seems to require manual input? I find the

One option might be to use a different app like Tap Log Records to
capture timestamped records and generate a CSV, then write some code to
parse the CSV and update your Org file. It's totally a hack, though.

Sacha Chua