It’s a new year, new time to start blogging again again.

There’s a bunch of new ground to cover.

Looking at my old posts… I’m surprised at how long ago I expressed interest in the Apple Journaling app. I still don’t use it because it still doesn’t have a MacOS version, and I can’t imagine typing and writing on a phone.

I’m thinking of it because New Year’s is the time of the year to think about time. You’re taking stock of the past year, planning what you’re going to do in the new year, thinking about what you want to change. And it’s striking how despite how all our lives now leaves some kind of trackable digital footprint, there’s nothing that integrates this all into something you can actually use. I mean, it’s striking, but I suppose it’s not surprising, given that the quantified life exists to serve some kind of commercial enterprise, and the “user” is actually the product in most cases. Apple is the least bad of the tech giants at this, but it’s hard to see how helping people integrate their time better helps sell more iPhones.

That said, I get how the phone is the center of things in terms of data collection. And I guess for for most people it’s still the main window into their own data. But I want more of a big-screen experience when it comes to analyzing and interpreting things.

Most calendaring and time management apps are about productivity, and that’s not what I’m concerned about at all here.

I want something that can help me

  • reflect on how my time is being used
  • plan for the future
  • reflect and plan at different time horizons (week, month, quarter, year, 5 year, lifetime)
  • see how the short-term day planning of a regular calendar adds up to long term planning (i.e. if I keep doing what I did this week, where will I be in a month or a year?)
  • visualize all the streams
  • take into account the body, where it is in space (handles travel, weather, time zones)

The three parts of this are:

  • ingesting the different streams
  • integrating them into a single database
  • visualizing them