In the quest to live a better, organized and more productive life you need all your data! And that exactly has been my quest for a long time, I have lots of data:
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Financial : Money and Quicken files from last 6 years (2001-08), Paper bahi khata from Seven Years (1995-2001) and Excel Sheets from several years (2005-2008)
- My day, what did I do: Paper based time tracking (1995-2001), Outlook files from (2003-2008)
- Health data, workouts: In Excel from 2002-08
- Contacts: In GMail, In Outlook (fortunately synced with my cell phone!)
- Blogs: In Blogspot and Wordpress since 2001
- Website: 2001-2003 (http://cse.ucsc.edu/~vaibhav and personal http://www.vitraag.com)
- My pictures: Organized in folders marked in format YEARMONTHDATE-EVENT since 2001
- My Videos: Roughly 8-9 disks in DV format!
- Friendships, Social Networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut
- Bookmarks - In Google
- Work related files, code and documents since 2001!
- Music: Songs as MP3 and ripped mp3s!
So as you can see I have a lot of data!! and I have been a big fan of measuring and tracking things. However I feel that I was more productive and has a better of things when I did paper pen tracking of how I spent time and money! Now i’m at loss - the primary symptom of digitization is that my data has lost its focus - I have data scattered everywhere for example what I do daily is scattered between outlook, google calendar, and mobile phone (ofcourse i’m less organized now :)), I have no good way of keeping track of my day….
I know this is tough problem for the computer industry etx.. but first and foremost I want peace of mind.. now a days my brain feel soo much scattered I feel like I dont have good handle on things and need to read more and understand things in order to do anything. I have come to believe that this is some kind of a dis-order may be ADD but i dont think I have been a non-focus kind of guy - just the thought of me not knowing about my stuff makes me a want to read and organize more which in turn leads to more reading and organizing and the end result is that I have very little time to get anything done! So this might be a bigger problem but I have come to believe that the cure needs to start with centralizing my data and creating a dashboard for it and all this has to have a very concrete tracking mechanism and a goal against it…