What metrics do you pay attention to?

Garmin Watch body battery. Was skeptical initially, but am surprised how well it works. It's a composite of sleep quality for gains (should recharge daily above 80 ideally) and physical stress, measured by heart rate variation, for losses.

Quasi-related to the body battery is minimal heart rate while sleeping (the watches automatic "resting" number is often higher, so I look at the chart). Relative to 2-week moving average it's a leading indicator of illness. I have nice charts for my recent covid and common cold, 1-2 days before the symptoms I could see unexplained (e.g. no drinks) higher levels. In absolute terms it correlates with endurance training and recovery after long training sessions (it goes lower with training in general, after a long session it is higher for 1-3 days, when it's back to low level it's full recovery, good time for further training).

Both help in simple decisions such as go to bed earlier, training intensity, whether evening coding session could be productive or better watch a movie, etc.

As a side note, it's funny how alcohol affects both metrics - same as illness + very low battery the next day. The metrics make me think twice and when both are bad it's better to skip drinking even if the context/schedule and subjective feelings are OK for it.

The number of times that I use nicotine. I'm drawing down from constant use, and now reserve it just for a small treat before bed. I hope to soon cut nicotine out entirely.

The percentage of the week that I make it to the gym. My goal is 4x (M-Th). I like to hit my goal. Aside: if anyone has felt their mental health slip or having trouble sleeping - absolute start going to the gym. The affect it has had on my life cannot be understated.

I'm an indie game developer on Steam and one of the most important business metrics for me is Wishlist Count. When I have a game coming up to release I can see what the level of interest is for it, and roughly how that will convert to sales. When a game is released that you have on your wishlist, Steam emails you about it, so it's a pretty valuable thing to have as a developer.

It's not a metric with 100% certainty, but if you tell me you have 1000 wishlisters, or 10,000, or 100,000 I can tell you roughly the range of sales that gets you.

I track sleep and exercise with an Oura ring and also track my investments. I also try to consume about 64 oz of water per day.

To flip this around, I stopped tracking HN and reddit upvotes and really all social media "likes" of any kind. I mostly did this by closing all my accounts (except HN and reddit). I also removed all analytics from all of my side projects. I have found this has shifted my creation process from "what will get me likes?" to "what do I really want to make?" and that's been very positive.

Personal:

- Tracking hours / quality of sleep (with the SleepCycle app)

- Weights I lift in compound exercises like bench press or deadlift (pen + paper). It's motivating to see progress.

- General daily well being on a scale from 1-10 (google doc). This is divided into my perceived productivity and mood. I seem to be quite erratic with tracking this recently though - I might build a simple app with reminders to help me. The scores I collect can be easily looked up in relation with my other notes (todo lists, basic journal etc.) to find what affects me the most.

- Budgeting (revolut)

Business:

Background - I'm working on an app to make online meetings more fun. At the core I have rooms where guests can hang out and engage in different activities. The metrics I focus most for now are:

- Monthly unique guests that join any kind of room as my guiding metric.

- Currently experimenting with total aggregated human time spent in the rooms daily / weekly / monthly. This seems to be a better metric because in contrast with a plain MAU it also indicates engagement and general impact (would love some feedback on that - for more context on the app: https://flat.social).

- Conversion rates from different call to actions spread across various subpages.

- Core user journey funnels to see where new users get stuck so I can clean up any confusing areas of the app out (copy, buttons, navigation etc.)

For ~10 years I have been doing what I call my "Daily Score". It is basically me reflecting and self-evaluating my day in 6 categories, that are the most relevant to me:

- Sleep - Diet - Exercise - Execution (how well did I did what I should be doing) - Mood - Social (how much did I socialize, spend time with loved ones etc)

The value is:

- During the day I might consider: "what would it take to end this day on a 3 in Diet", for example - When I enter the values for a day, I reflect over what went well/wrong - which can help me improve

Every morning, I get an email with a reminder to fill in my Daily Score for the previous day. It takes 30-60 seconds - sometimes a bit more, if it sets off a chain of thoughts.

It started out a spreadsheet, then I built a simple web-app for it about a year ago.

I often thought about sharing it, but doubt it makes sense without a lot of explanation about the value being in the self-reflection - not the data.

Here are a handful of personal ones for me:

- Health & Well-being: Step count (Apple Watch). Weight (Withings Scale). Meditation minutes. Sleep (Whoop). First sunlight exposure (circadian entrainment). Lunch and dinner times (circadian entrainment). Water consumption.

- Work: Time spent on Conjure. Time spent on client work.

- Self Development: Books read. Time spent reading. Time spent consuming inspiring material (mindset).

I mostly track them manually or automatically in Conjure[1] (disclaimer I'm building it) and then link them to Habits and Objectives in it.

I also tend to add and remove different measures/metrics at different times based on what is going on in my life, or pause certain ones for a while if I'm burnt out and need less overhead in my day-to-day.

[1] https://conjure.so/

>= 25km walked on Pokemon Go / week

<= $70(summer)/$100(winter) Electricity consumption / quarter

>= 1 book chapter / day

>= 1 time leaving the apartment / day

income - expenses > 0

I track more than a dozen quantities related to my daily activities, included alcohol/junk food consumption, exercise, weight training numbers, finance info (net worth/spending), book notes, project commitments, TODO list, language learning, and so on.

I built a simple web framework that makes it very easy to add new mini-webapps (I call them WebWidgets). It turns out it is very easy to build simple webapps if the data size is modest, there is a small number of users, and you can assume the users have newish browsers. I create dynamic pages without any frontend libraries like React, just by composing HTML strings in Javascript and slapping them into div/span tags. Works like a charm.

For many years this was only a personal project, but I'm slowly opening the system up for use by other people. I offer free accounts and tech support for early adopters, and I will even code up a few widgets for you if you're interested. Check it out:

https://webwidgets.io/

I use an Apple Watch and the Health app on the iPhone to track health related metrics.

Every morning, I check and track:

* Sleep duration

* Blood pressure

* Body weight (and BMI)

Everyday I track:

* Water intake

* Exercise duration, active calories burned and “stand hours” (these are the rings to close on Fitness on Apple Watch/iPhone)

I also take a look at the following, though not every single day:

* Heart rate variability (HRV)

* Two-lead ECG measurement

* Resting heart rate

I don’t use the trends feature in the Health app. It doesn’t seem that prominent or useful.

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time reviewing my metrics, both personal and professional. I realized that many of the metrics fell into the category of lag measures (e.g. pounds lost per month). Now, I'm trying to pepper my goals with more lead measures (e.g. number of times I hit the gym per week), wanting a mix of both types of metrics.

Same applies for running my business. Instead of focusing all my efforts on revenue, I'm keeping a close eye on metrics in my control (e.g. number of people I touched base with this week)

Personally? None, I have already to many of those at work. Single exception: mpg for my 1982 Range Rover V8, because of reasons.

Professionally? Right now not enough of those needed and to much of pointless ones. I try to get people to use the proper KPIs for what they are doing so, it seems to be quite an uphill battle. Because who really cares when POs are placed as long as they are delivered on time (which nobody is monitoring right now...)?

In no particular order:

Number of steps (10k/day goal)

Number of cups of coffee (going for the high score here)

Bedtime/wake up time (need 7 hrs)

Time spent focused on kids (want an hour of dedicated time with them on weekends, not including meals and taking them to/from school).

Portfolio balance (working toward escape velocity).

Hours studying language (targeting 1 hr/day).

Alcoholic drinks per day/week (try to stay under 2/day, 4/week).

- GitHub contributions - Aim for at least one per day. If not, then I should have a reason for it.

- Weight (MyFitnessPal) - on a cut right now, and I'll log progress when it decreases

- Time in VR/calories burned (aiming for 40 mins/250 cals minimum, but typically do significantly more)

- COVID - I'm high risk for a while, so I do a daily LFD

- Donations received on Open Collective

What I currently track:

   - Hours of sleep per day
   - Calories burned per day
   - Calorie intake per day
   - Caffeine per day (mg)
   - Financial Portfolio performance every few days
   - Monthly spend on different categories (eg. food, housing, misc)
   - Squat, bench, deadlift numbers

What I want to track:

  - Water per day
  - Blood levels. I'd love to get bloodwork done very 6months to a year?
  - Books read (mostly so I read more)
  - Blogposts written
  - Code written? Whether its a personal project, random scripts, leetcode puzzles. Helps me realize if I'm doing what I want vs. spending my time elsewhere.

Definitely more I want to track. Love seeing everyone else's ideas.

- Happiness time: how long I can stay happy (or content, at least) through a single day.

Before this turns rough, philosophical or greedy… it is just related to pretty basic fulfillment of a pretty modest life.

From my business life I'm looking at the MRR of my project https://topstonks.com, our site traffic, etc.

From my personal life -

I guess stepping on the scale in the mornings, haha. That's a depressing one to watch. There are the obvious personal finance metrics as well.

Also keeping an eye on inflation... maybe Covid infection numbers as well since those seem to be in the news alot. It's kind of hard not to see those numbers lately.

Personal:

- Time spent reading daily: my min goal is 30 minutes. - Time spent on social media: trying to lower this to as close to 0 as possible, currently limiting to about 20 minutes per day. - Amount of sleep

Professional:

- Average ranking position for all keyword targets (I'm an SEO/digital marketer) - Amount of work hours invested (I'm a remoter, so I want to make sure I hit AT LEAST 8). PS - this is never a problem LOL.

The only metric I currently pay attention to is the readiness score from my Oura ring.

It's interesting to see how much alcohol, eating just before sleeping or stress affects this score. And it's also nice to get the confirmation on how well I'm feeling from a tool that measures it.

My inbox count, otherwise - I try to minimize this! Growing up, it was nearly an obsession in my household.

I realized this lead to a certain amount of stress and my attempt to combat this is - 'let things be' (to an extent).

I can't help but obsess about sleep, and time spent in meetings. Things that tend to have a negative side, rather than positive.

Strava training calendar/log. Strava freshness and fitness (though I know it is mostly bogus).

I have come down to one metric in the end - sleep time (tracking with sleep++ on apple watch).

The rest of the metrics lost meaning to me - they fluctuate too much depending on the weather / schedule / other factors. They also do not affect me as much as sleep.

Watts/kg output when cycling. On 1min, 5min, 20min and 60 minute windows. This is the only one I think that I _obsess_ over.

I keep rough track on my weight, but mostly over a quarterly scale and mostly as a big input to my W/kg!

Things I think about and physically log:

  - Investments (monthly)
  - Estimated monthly budget

Things I think about and mentally log:

  - Actual monthly spending
  - Caffeine intake
  - Hours of sleep

Bedtime.

One rep maxes.

Internal thermometer of the sheet pan meals I make every other day.

Podcast revenue.

Amount of dirty laundry in the hamper.

- Local COVID positivity rate

- Total value of my investments and savings

- Time spent sleeping

At this time, there is very little else in my life that requires me to change my routine.

- Running Mileage on Strava. (have a goal of 2K for the year)

- Winnings/Losses $ each week on FanDuel/DraftKings

- MPGe while driving with a Prius Prime

Love this question!

For me personally:

- Whoop Recovery % / Cals burned

- Number of hours working out per week

- Calories per day (not tracked well)

- Monthly business revenue / number of projects completed

- Net worth

Weight lifted for barbell overhead press, squat, bench press, row, and pull-up.

I don't currently but I have read that HRV is very important.

The weather.

number of steps on apple health

pomodoro count

Net worth.