What did you actually do last Tuesday?

If you have to think hard, or scroll through a pile of ticked-off tasks to find out, that's the problem I wanted to fix. Most planners are good at tomorrow. The moment you finish something, it disappears. You never find out whether that "2 hour" task really took 2 hours, whether this week was better than the last one, or whether the new routine you started is sticking.

I tried a lot of planners: Super Productivity, Vikunja, Planify, TickTick and a few more open source ones for Linux and Android. Some were really good. But none did what I wanted, and the ones that came close kept the useful parts behind a paywall. I wasn't going to pay a monthly fee just to plan my own day.

So I built my own. It took several months, and I use it every day. It's called Personal Planner, and it's built around one loop: plan the day, do the day, look back, learn from it.

What's in it, and why:

- **Day**: an hour-by-hour timeline. Drag a block to move it, pull the edge to resize. Clashing blocks get flagged instead of silently stacking. It also has week view, recurring activities, templates, categories, carry-forward for unfinished work, and undo/redo, because plans change about five times a day

- **Timers**: start, pause and stop from a task. When you finish, the minutes you really spent are saved next to the minutes you planned. My estimates started out very wrong

- **Review** (the part I care about most): daily, weekly and an overview. For anything you didn't finish you write why, in your own words. No dropdown, because "I got stuck on a bug for three hours" tells you more than "not enough time"

- **Consistency**: a year-long heatmap like GitHub's, plus current and best streak, so "have I been consistent?" gets an answer and not a feeling

- **Experiments**: want to try Learn C for an hour a day? Tag the blocks, set a start and end date and targets like 60 minutes on weekdays and 90 on weekends. Every completed block with that tag updates it, so there's nothing extra to log

- **Inbox**: for ideas without a day yet. Give one dated sessions and each becomes a timed task on Day, so "research SAP" at 45 minutes across five days is five blocks. Missed ones land in a Left over backlog, not nowhere

It's free, with no subscription and no locked features. It's local-first, so it works offline and sync between devices is optional. Runs on Linux, Android, Windows and macOS.

The honest bits: the Windows and macOS builds are unsigned, so expect a SmartScreen or Gatekeeper warning. I don't own a Mac, so macOS has only been tested on GitHub Actions. Reminders and timer notifications work on Linux and Android only for now.

Download: https://github.com/Karthikshabari/PersonalPlanner/releases

Code: https://github.com/Karthikshabari/PersonalPlanner

Dev here. Do you ever look back on your week before planning the next one, or do you just move on?

I’ve been an Apple Watch and whoop user since they came out. As a former pro athlete and business executive I’ve always wanted to have more data about me. In the same way companies make better decisions with data, I wanted to do the same for my life.

But wearables only gave you health metrics. All wearables simply regurgitate the same data in different ways. They show the results of your lifestyle, not the lifestyle itself. So I asked ChatGPT about apps that could track your entire time and correlate it to your health metrics and found one called Watt that did exactly that. It connects to all wearables and gives you your work-life balance next to very cool productivity tools as well. For all data junkies in this group I highly recommend it.

Been getting into tracking lately, and the best part isn’t the data, it’s the stuff I didn’t expect to see. Things I thought mattered turned out to be noise.

What’s your “wait, what?” moment? Something you tracked that showed the opposite of what you expected, or made you actually change a habit.

Claude has been pretty good at identifying patterns that relate sleep & journal entries. It's a lot easier to listen to this than read the numbers, so I had it generate a podcast, and wrote a blog post about it here:

https://jaan.io/lifelogging-with-large-language-models

For example, more emotional entries have correlated to a change in sleep patterns, and it's also been able to identify trends over months.

Some of these connections are intuitive - I could make them on my own; but overall it's been a very useful cognitive aid so that I don't have to manually review my sleep data or journals (or finances).

Does anyone else do some version of this? It's been pretty fun doing this so I'm open to any feedback or improvements - let me know if you end up trying it :)

Maybe interesting for some of you, I've been building my own QS system for about 8 months now. Every source lands in one database that I own, and on top of that sits a dashboard I use every day.

Images

1. Monthly recap for September, real data. This is the "public" variant, so body, location, journal and most nutrition details are left out.
2. The daily view. This one runs on demo data, only the Plex and PlayStation cards are real.

What I track

• Sleep, recovery, HRV: WHOOP via NOOP
• Health data: Apple Health via Health Auto Export
• Strength training: Streak
• Nutrition: YAZIO
• Weight and body: Renpho scale
• E-bike rides: Cowboy
• Location and places: Dawarich (self-hosted)
• Mac usage: ActivityWatch
• iPhone screen time: screentime, reads the macOS Biome data that iCloud syncs from the iPhone
• Movies and shows: Plex via Tautulli
• Music: Spotify via your_spotify (self-hosted)
• Gaming: PlayStation Network (presence, trophies, library)
• Voice chat: Discord, durations only, no content
• Indoor climate: Home Assistant
• Weather: Open-Meteo
• Calendar: EventKit on the Mac
• Coding: GitHub and Forgejo commits
• AI usage: Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode tokens

How it's built

• I built every collector myself. The only third-party parts are the apps and services they read from.
• Collectors: one small Python service per source, 20 in total, spread over my Mac, a Proxmox LXC and Unraid. Each one keeps a local SQLite outbox and a raw archive, so nothing gets lost when the server is down.
• Core: FastAPI with PostgreSQL 17 + PostGIS on its own Debian VM in my Proxmox homelab. Only Core writes to the database.
• Collectors send versioned batches. Core dedupes them via identity keys and content hashes. A day without data stays "missing", it never turns into a fake zero.
• There's no cron. A scheduler puts jobs into a Postgres-backed queue with leases and retries. It rebuilds the daily values and runs the analysis.
• Every collector reports its sync runs, so every card shows where its data comes from and how fresh it is. If a source stops syncing, I see it right away.
• The dashboard only reads from Core's API and doesn't calculate anything itself.

Tech stack

• Dashboard: Next.js 16, React 19, Tailwind 4, shadcn/ui, Recharts + d3, MapLibre for maps
• Core: Python 3.12, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, PostgreSQL 17, PostGIS, pgBackRest for backups
• Infra: Proxmox, Docker Compose, Caddy, Forgejo Actions for CI
• Extras: a read-only MCP server so an LLM chat ("Companion") can query my data, and push notifications to my phone via Home Assistant

Everything runs locally in my LAN, no cloud service in between except the APIs of the sources themselves. Happy to go into detail on any part of it

I'm 30, do backend dev, and always figured I was someone with a regular schedule. I used to hit the company gym for half an hour every morning before work. Last long break I just stayed home, gamed and stayed up late, didn't exercise at all, and noticed my logged VO2 max dropped from 40 to 37.9.

I used to think I could keep it up forever and that a week off wouldn't matter much. But the data told me that once you slack off, the numbers drop fast. Just seven lazy days and my cardio capacity dropped a level, no hesitation.

I'm gonna start easing those numbers back up from tomorrow. When you guys got back to training after a holiday, did you ever hit this kind of rapid drop?

I've been building the mental equivalent of a recovery score and would love this community's critique of the measures:

• Verbal fluency: a 30-second animal-naming test, scored on-device for unique items, repeats, category clusters and pace per 10 s, against my own baseline after 3 days.
• PERCLOS (eyelid closure %) from a webcam, intraday vs. my first 3 hours awake; it rises reliably as I tire, so I use it to lower the morning score live.
• HRV and resting HR vs. 30-day baselines from Apple Health (I wear a Zepp; 367 nights imported).
• Load: app switches, new words on screen, gaze jumps between windows and phone glances, weighted by time awake.

Question: what would you use as ground truth to validate a score like this? I'm considering short EEG (Muse) sessions per person for calibration.

Disclosure: I turned this into a Mac app (Cortex, paid, all processing on-device): https://cortex-mind-rho.vercel.app. Mostly here for the methodology critique, though.

Using quantified-self.io

I lead client-facing projects in tech, which usually means at least 2-3 happy hours and client dinners every week. Last year's checkup showed my uric acid was way too high. I've thought about quitting drinking for good, but that's just not realistic in my line of work.

This year I started actually looking at where I stood. I forced my sleep back into a normal rhythm, made sure I got a steady 7-8h a night, and began logging how I feel in an app. My August checkup had uric acid at 446. Still a little above the line, but way better than last year.

I figured it'd just be a boring log, but then I lined up my daily notes with my heart rate and HRV, and it was honestly pretty clear. I'm not trying to quit the work dinners entirely. They're part of the job. I just want to see if I can find some balance between work and my body through this.

Anyone else using this kind of tracking to slowly get your body back on track while dealing with a high-pressure job?

My grandmother measured her blood glucose every day. The data was there. What was missing was someone connecting it to how she actually felt.

My grandmother had type 2 diabetes and used insulin.

We spoke every week or two. Sometimes I'd notice she sounded more tired than usual and start asking questions.

It turned out her glucose readings had been rising despite her usual routine.

We arranged for an endocrinologist to visit. The doctor found changes in the tissue at her regular injection sites that could have been affecting insulin absorption, and helped adjust her injection technique and follow-up care.

What stayed with me wasn't the medical complexity.

It was how much depended on smo noticing a change, asking a few questions and connecting the dots.

We spend so much time discussing biomarkers. But sometimes the most useful health information is what a person can tell us.

What about your experience? Have you ever noticed something important about your health that your measurements didn't capture?

im in college and i love coffee but i also really care about my sleep. so i basically wanted to figure out how much coffee i can have without it messing up my night, and that meant actually knowing how much is still in my system at any point. also kept watching my friends grab an energy drink at like 9pm and be able to fall asleep i just feel like its affecting their sleep more than they think and then they are tired the next day and its a cycle

its on iphone and watch .id honestly love feedback from people who already track this kind of stuff, like whats missing, whats wrong, whats annoying. happy to answer anything about how it works. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/half-lyfe-caffeine-coach/id6815463981

I used to love Google Timeline before they deleted 10 years of my data. Now one needs a different way of doing this. It might not be as useful as tracking resting heart rate, but I've always liked to track every county, state, and country i've been to. I'm interested if anyone is doing this in other geographies (e.g., whatever the county equivalent in, say, France is). Also curious if, in a group like this, where tracking oneself is the main event, what level of concern there is about constantly tracking and storing your location data.

I used to have an Apple Watch but stopped wearing it for all the extra stuff and I now wear a Garmin and genuinely enjoy having data on my daily steps,
calories burned, and activity levels. But I also own Casio watches that I'd love to wear more often.

The problem is that I've become so accustomed to having all this data that wearing a regular watch almost feels like I'm missing something. At the same time, I wonder whether constantly tracking these metrics is making me a little too focused on numbers rather than simply enjoying being active. I’d also even argue I obsessed over hitting steps and calories amount.

For those of you into quantified self, how do you decide which metrics are actually useful to track vs which ones just create noise or unnecessary pressure?

Have any of you deliberately stopped tracking certain things and found that you felt better for it? I'm curious how you balance using data to improve your life without feeling like you have to measure everything.

Context: ~2 years of continuous data (Oura for sleep/HRV, Strong for training, everything piped into a Postgres db I spent too long on). Bloodwork is the my weakest link.

Current state:
- 1 draw/year at my annual physical
- Different lab 2 of the last 3 times
- Panel composition varies year to year
- No control over fasting or time of draw

So I have n=3, collected under inconsistent conditions so I can't find a patter.

Questions for people tracking labs seriously:
1. What cadence are you on: quarterly, biannual, event-driven?
2. How much does keeping the same lab/assay matter in practice?
3. Is there a minimum frequency below which you'd say the data isn't worth collecting for trend purposes?

I’ve been trying to get a single, useful view of my health data and I keep hitting walls. Curious how others handle this.

My setup:

• Two watches: a CMF Watch (Nothing) that I use for workouts and a Timberland watch for everyday wear. Some days I wear neither and only have my phone.
• Android 16, so everything ends up in Health Connect.
• Home workouts with Feeel, which doesn’t write to Health Connect, so those sessions never show up anywhere.

What I’d like is pretty simple on paper:

1. One place that aggregates data from all my devices (sleep, heart rate, steps, workouts) and handles the overlap when two devices record the same thing.
2. A training plan and a diet plan that adapt to that data.
3. An AI assistant (I use Claude) that can read the data and adjust the plans, instead of a generic coach locked to one brand’s hardware.

What I’ve found so far:

• Google Health has an AI coach, but it seems to require a Fitbit or Pixel Watch.
• There are some MCP connectors and webhook apps that bridge Health Connect to an AI or a server, but nothing that covers the whole loop.
• Open-source workout apps are great but mostly don’t talk to Health Connect.

So, a few questions:

• How do you deal with multiple devices recording the same data? Do you pick one source per metric?
• Has anyone built a self-hosted pipeline from Health Connect to their own server or database? What did you use?
• Is anyone using an LLM to adjust training or nutrition based on real wearable data? Did it actually help, or was it a gimmick?
• Is there an app I’m missing that already does most of this?

Not selling anything, just trying to figure out whether I should build this for myself or whether a good solution already exists.