The Personal Dashboard
This is essay 5 of 6 for 1729 Writers Cohort #1. Apply to 1729 today.
Life is complicated. How do you even keep track of everything, even just the simple things? There is sleep, diet, exercise, not to mention relationships, career, side projects, and everything else. Drifting into ultimately unhealthy behaviors is so easy. If you’re not really paying attention to what you’re doing every day, what you do every day probably won’t make much sense. I’m realizing this, once again, right now.
Losing Track
About a year ago, I decided to cut down on caffeine to improve my sleep. It worked. I gradually lowered my coffee consumption over the course of a few weeks and found that I was less jittery and had an easier time getting to sleep at night. I didn’t even miss the extra coffee. Then, some months later, having forgotten how much trouble caffeine had given me before, I started to want to have more freedom in my coffee and tea habits. It would be nice to be able to have a little coffee or tea in the early afternoon, wouldn’t it? And how much could it hurt?
Soon I was back to my previous norm of 1+ cups of coffee per day. I often found myself wired when I tried to go to sleep. I would fall asleep when I was tired enough, but my Fitbit kept reporting poor sleep quality due to an elevated heart rate while sleeping. I didn’t give it much thought and just kept going.
On another whim, another few months later, I recently decided to try starting my day with a lower-caffeine drink and was surprised to see that my heart rate was dramatically lower when I went to sleep at night, 10-15 beats per minute lower. My sleep scores were higher, and I felt more rested. I also felt less anxious during the day.
I was lucky to find my way back to a better habit. But should this kind of thing really be left to chance, to whims? Shouldn’t there be some kind of alert when you are drifting into poorer health, based on objective measures, in case you and the people around you miss the signs of deterioration?
This is the motivation for the niche, nerdy quantified self movement, as well as the broader increase in tracking steps, sleep, and other health metrics with built-in software in popular devices like smartphones and smartwatches. There is a wide array of options, from iPhones’ and Apple Watches’ built-in activity and sleep tracking, to simpler Fitbit watches.
The various solutions can feel a bit siloed, so self-optimization enthusiasts try to create personal dashboards bringing together all the important metrics in their lives. These dashboards, like dashboards used in businesses, make it easy to get an overview of a few key metrics at a glance.
The State of Personal Dashboards
The typical way of creating a personal dashboard seems to be setting up a simple spreadsheet or a more complicated Notion setup and tracking a few metrics and manually updating it every day. There are also apps that pull together metrics from sources like smartwatches, calendars, time tracking apps like RescueTime, and more. Exist is a pretty easy-to-use example, though it doesn’t quite feel like a polished mass-market product. Overall, the whole personal dashboard space is still pretty DIY and nerdy. It’s limited to people who would even think of tracking their life and then figuring out how to implement a system.
The Future of Personal Dashboards
Tracking tends to support efforts at improving metrics. What else would support efforts at improving metrics? A social aspect can be helpful. People often run, hike, or bike together regularly, encouraging each other and keeping each other on track towards challenging goals. People can form groups on Strava and compete in running or biking.
Strava is popular and seems to work well for people. It’s pretty focused on running, biking, and other forms of exercise. It could be helpful to provide more areas for people to track and compete in. This is what Vital promises: a place to track activity, sleep, and diet, and share and compete with friends. There is a lack of apps that broadly cover health metrics, have a strong social aspect, and a nice user experience. Vital looks like it could fill this gap.
How could this progress further? We can assume that personal dashboard options will continue to get more useful and user-friendly. Where could we be in five years? What a person really needs is not necessarily an app, but an assistant. Something that is keeping track even when you’re not and presenting interesting trends and correlations to you, for you to review.
So in my caffeine example, what if I had a clearer picture of how much caffeine I was consuming each day, and could see how an increase in caffeine subtly worsened my sleep? I could have checked my dashboard and seen an alert that my sleep had worsened 20% in the last week, at the same time that my caffeine consumption had increased 20%. It would have been obvious what to do from there, and I could have found my way back to a better habit in days instead of months.
This kind of thing is probably not far off. The space is rapidly developing as sensors in personal devices proliferate. Combining clear, actionable metrics and reporting with the ability to connect and compete with others could improve lives at a large scale if it goes mainstream.