in my life i have to keep up with lots of small tasks – and i don’t necessarily need help remembering to do them, just need a running track record of if they happened or how many times it happened during the day. did my lawyer call or respond to my email, did i email my lawyer, how many cigarettes did i smoke, was i able to speak to my son this morning, did i go to bed before 12, etc…
all of these things together define my daily routine and then turn into: why is this situation happening?
now if i had a small app that asked me these questions every day, and i could respond with a yes/no, or a number indicate if the response applied to today or yesterday – i start to gain some quantitative data about how my life is going. why was i having a bad week? well, i had 5 cups of coffee every day and went to sleep after 12 most days. at the end of the week I can assume that I have to cut back on coffee and go to bed earlier – or my week will be bad.
I could keep a diary – but that is another thing to do.
if there was an app that allowed me to set some basic questions – and the app asked me daily, then i am keeping a diary of statistical data without the hassle.
the interface would be simple – question and answer, day that it pertains to (today or yesterday), room for a small note to explain further if needed, and a way to dismiss the question all together: something like ‘i am done tracking this’ which would remove the question from the que.
A review, which should be sent weekly, should look at all of the data i am tracking in a calendar and quantitative view. with that data i could hopefully gain some insight into my habits and make some changes for the positive.
so this would be sort of a daily diary twitter style – not a bunch of thoughts written out that i have to go back an re- read, but conscise data in a graph that shows instances per day and their outcome. simple really – a quantitative overview of my habits and their results.
I want to get to the end of the week/month/year whatever and say (with coffee for instance) – i had an average of 3 cups per day, and i was OK – but in sept i moved to 5 per day and started having bad weeks. the 3rd week of sept i started smoking 6 cigarettes per day, probably because i was having bad weeks due to the extra coffee.
if twitter is a concise insight into my thoughts, then this would be a concise insight into my habits.
The Deets:
the app should naturally start on the web, with an xml output that could be used for mobile and desktop versions.
users could sign up – set their initial questions (public/private) and possible responses, and set their question delivery method and time. (cakePHP)
links to livst.at/nathan would see my public questions and graphs
desktop app in air gathers questions from web api and has ability to display at a set time
mobile versions (android,iphone) should be quickly following
widget to embed on my blog/facebook for a particular question or set of questions
api ()
all answer methods should be aware if the daily set has been answered – i.e. my android phone would not ask me if it checked the db and saw that i already answered (by desktop or email). so i don’t get a bajillion popups all asking me the same thing.
public questions and responses could be autoposted to twitter
how will it make money: ads, silly. then sell to yahoo. Profit!
February 10th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Some of what you want to do may already be doable with the Pachube data logger. See http://www.pachube.com/. They have an iPhone app, and possibly apps for other smartphones as well.
February 10th, 2010 at 7:42 pm
hey little bro:
i’ve been looking at transparent interfaces, because i hate applications interfering in my life (which i think is a common sentiment). i actually ditched my facebook account recently because there are so few ways to control how the information is molded to fit your world — you get the news feed with a few filters, but not much, and if facebook decides they know better (which seems fairly common), then your workflow gets changed out from under you.
right now my favorite apps are twitter and evernote; both offer multiple ways to get the info to the app so you can use it later. evernote’s great — i can email it, use the iphone app, a web interface, and i think i can text it to the app as well. twitter is, as far as i’m concerned, an extension of my phone’s SMS messaging.
i think, in light of those ideas, that the best way for this to work is for you to create some way for a user to create a fairly simple list fo criteria — say, a list that needs to have a single x added to it — and then let them SMS a mesage from their phones, call it in, or email it, since a lot of phones make it kinda easy for even unsavvy users to store those types of numbers.
(having said that, i was in a meeting yesterday with a 24 year old woman who literally had no idea her phone had a camera until i pointed at the lens, and she’d had the phone for a year. all she knew was that she could text. so much for technology journals’ advocacy of the notion of an entire generation of multitaskers. it’s just not true.)