Tom Cooks

Personal logs

2025-10-06

Okay. We’re back. It’s quite cold, but maybe I’m just under the weather. Today, I should talk about how I take notes

I have slowly begun to appreciate how nice it is to. Keep a log of what I do and of what happens around me.

Personal logging is not too difficult to manage, and it provides me with data that is very often ignorable and useless; but when you need it it pays itself a thousandfold.

I do not particularly like “the quantified self”, “task tracking, and similar trends that appeared in my tech bubble within the last decade. It turns confused people, often bored professionals in tertiary industry, into middle managers, busy bodies, grayish aparachics that do not really provide anything useful other than having kept themselves busy.

So, what do I actually track? What I like to keep track of at the moment are data points that allow me quantizes what is important to me:

So, expenses tracking: everytime I spend money i jot down a #spesa tag followed by the amount I spent, followed by the name of the store or service; followed, finally, by any note or extra tags that might be useful in the future, some details I know my future self is going to thank myself for having written down.

I also add a photo of the paper receipt if I’m given one; this seems to be a lot of work, but it’s pretty easy and streamlined: I already have my note-taking application open to track the expenses, and attaching a photo is a tap away so it’s not that difficult

Expenses tracking allows me to have an idea of how much money I spend, and by grouping notes by store name I can tell which store impacts my monthly budget the most.

I have written a short script that shows me, for a given time span, how much money I spent; I plan to automate this script so that every end of the week I can receive a little report and check how well I’m doing with budgering.

I also keep track of my salary, so my expenses script can also track money coming in and how my savings are doing.

I plan to export this data automatically to hledger, a beautiful piece of software that is the standard for rigorous, free as in freedom, accounting that I wish i grokked betted.

Other data point that I track is my weight: every Monday after waking up I weigh myself and take 3 pics front, left and right side.

This monthly sampling gives me a steady flux of information about my body while reducing the normal ups and downs caused by water retention, temporary calor increase, direction of wind.

I used to keep track of kilocalories of each meal, along with macronutrients; I stopped doing that because it was very taxing: while I enjoy precie tracking and keeping a strics upper bound to my calor intake, the tracking part just took too much time. One strategy I successfully implemented was to monitor kilocalories and macronutrients only if my weight went above a certain point, stopping the practice as soon as it went back to a lower point.

An acceptable middle ground would be tracking only kilocalories and proteins, ideally once a week when batch cooking all meals of the week (never going to happen, this is absurdist comedy).

After months of successful, albeit very time consuming precise tracking I switched to a much simpler version: i track my 3 daily meals using a short description of what I ate, together with a picture of the plate if I can. I’ve been doing this for years and I never checked any of this data or one of the thousand pics of plates with my hand next to it to have some perspective of the amount of food.

One day I will train an AI to confidently ballpark the food amount and the nutrients from those pics, let’s see.

These pics and basic food logging seem to be more useful as a mean to keep myself from overeating rather than a valuable datapoint for the future, unless I wanted to show a dietician or doctor exactly what I’ve been eating in the last month.

The next data point I track is sickness: whenever I feel sick I jot it down along with any useful data I might have usch as temperature, medications I took, etc. This is quite useful when having to check how often you get sick in a year or, paired with meal tracking, if you had any food that made you feel unwell.

I also keep track of any exercise I do, gym sessions, runs, short walks for errands; I never used this data; when I’ll go back to more rigorous bodybuilding I should keep an eye on these datapoints in order to keep myself motivated. Unfortunately lately I’m focusing on other things which are more important to me right now, namely work

And how do I track work? With a structured todo-list, paired with pomodoro timers. For those that do not know, pomodoro tracking is a tracking method often used by programmers. It boils down to a period of deep focus (generally 25 mins), followed by a short break (5 mins). This alternation between focused work and rest is very useful to avoid distractions and wasting time with useless busywork.