Seeking collaborators & testers: working on an open source habit tracking and self-journaling tool

Obviously there is no shortage of tracking tools out there, but I was in search of one that I could easily fold into my daily routine, and for me, that meant merging tracking with other daily use-cases.

For a few years I’ve been using a handful of tools:

  • A Google spreadsheet to identify yearly and monthly goals (4-5 bullets, and an assessment of previous month’s performance)
  • Each evening, Google Keep or Inbox to identify the top 3-4 tasks for the following day
  • Played with a few different habit trackers like Coach.me and Loop for Android

These worked, but due to being dispersed across a few tools/platforms, it was easy to forget about each, and fail to keep up the habits.

As such, I decided to integrate simple versions of each of these into a single light-weight web app, which has reduced the friction of each use-case (I essentially always have the app open in a tab), and allowed me to host all this data in one place for easier analysis.

Here’s the prototype app - Flow Dashboard

In summary:
Flow is an open source personal dashboard that allows users to keep focus on what matters: medium and long-term goals, ongoing projects, the top tasks for the day, and habits to build. It also includes an option for a daily journal to track (fully customizable) daily metrics like stress and productivity, as well as collect short narratives (with optional #tags and @mentions) to help learn associations with daily activities.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks and I’d welcome anyone interested in the tool to test it out, or get involved and help build it out.

Near-term goals: I’d love to add more traditional QS data streams into Flow (step trackers, smartphone sensors, etc), as well as a mobile client for even easier integration into my daily routine.

Thanks!

Jeremy

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Hi Jeremy! Thanks for sharing to your idea and prototype implementation! I tried it out and found it very intuitive to use - was even able to chat with the messenger bot. Slick UI. I’m currently evaluating different ways to store and track my data and will keep my eyes on this. Could you say a few words about the data model or database approach used?

I encourage others to give it a go!

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Thanks for giving it a look @Qek!

I built on Google App Engine with a custom API as I’m very familiar with the platform.
The data model for the daily-use aspects of the app (Top tasks, Goals, Habits & Journals) are all custom models (see models.py) but I’m using a TrackingDay model to store more passively collected abstract metrics. Each row contains a JSON data object, which means it’s easily extensible without code updates.

Currently I’m only pulling in commits from Github, but this is where I plan to add daily roll-ups of Google Fit data, and anything else that may be useful to include in regressions against the rest of the data.

For my purposes this data model is quite sufficient, as when ready for more complex analysis, it’ll probably make sense to push the data to Compute Engine, BigQuery or Cloud ML, which are much better set up to do statistical computations / roll-ups, machine learning etc.

Feel free to get in touch directly if you have more questions, or if there’s anything you’d recommend to make this project a good fit for your collection / analytics needs.

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Hi Jeremy,

This looks very interesting I’m trying to install it locally (I would like to have copies of my data…) but finding it difficult to find out what I need to add in the secrets.py and .js files.

Could you give some guidance on setting up the configuration?

Thanks in advance,
Matt

Happy to – I’ve been meaning to clarify the setup process. I’m sending you a direct message with contact info.