Looking for Integrated Scalable Queryable Platform for Digital Tracking

*Note, I’m new to the forum and am not totally sure about posting conventions—feel free to let me know if I screwed up in some way.

Hey everyone,

For a while now I’ve envisioned setting up (or possibly creating) a flexible scalable system to inform myself about everything I track. If you know of a software that can already do the following or can think of a way to do something like this (by setting up a relational database, etc) please share.

Here’s what I want to be able to do:

With as little manual tracking effort possible, I want to be able to query all my digital information in odd or interesting ways. Here are some examples (which don’t necessarily have any obvious utility):

  • Return the number of sent emails last month.

  • Plot hours slept vs alcohol consumed.

  • Calculate the correlation (or linear regression, etc) between daily tasks completed and the time I get up.

  • List all items I tracked between given dates.

  • List all emails received that relate to project X.

  • Plot characters per email vs tasks completed.

  • Plot bodyweight vs fast food spending and Fitbit steps.

  • Load all documents associated with project X.

  • View bookmarks associated with project X between a given date range and related to person X.

Anyway, that should give an idea of what I want to be able to do. To be clear, I don’t necessarily want these particular pieces of information; I want to be able to generally make these kinds of queries and plots with minimal effort. The resulting data structure would probably look like some sort of interconnected web of labeled multi-column tables of information, but I’m not a data scientist so I can’t quite say.

Anyway, if you know of any software that can already do this or know of software that has the capacity to do this kind of stuff (intelligently link data, perform and plot novel queries, compute correlations, etc) please share.

*Note, I am aware of Notion, which I see as having potential, but it doesn’t have plotting functionality (yet), seems to have limited searching, tagging, and query functionality, and I feel like there would be a high burden of manual tracking within Notion.

Do you need to? Parsed hour or even ten minute interval data takes so little memory nowadays. Otherwise try Shimmer and open humans.

It’s quite a big project. The first step is to get your data into some sort of structured database. Some of the data already exists in electronic format, such as your email; the task is to parse/import this into a database. Different apps may have APIs/webhooks you can use to import the data. Some of the data must be recorded manually, such as alcohol consumed. You can use an app, spreadsheet, etc.

Then there is the querying/plotting/etc. You may want to start with good old Excel. In particular, Pivot Tables let you do various types of aggregation like what you describe. Or SQL, AirTable, etc.

+1 for Airtable… also, consider Google Sheets vs Excel.