I'm Sacha Chua. I want to convince you that it's well worth investing the time and effort into building a personal dashboard that brings together the different things that you track.

This is my dashboard. It's a Ruby on Rails site that I've been gradually adding to over the past year. Let me show you an example of how this helps me change the way I live.

I started tracking my clothes because I was curious about what small thing I could start tracking every day. I also wanted to see if I could use the data to simplify my wardrobe.

At first, I tried tracking this on paper, using numbers that I'd Sharpied onto the tags of my clothing. That didn't work out so well because I had duplicate records and missing records.

So I started building this website, logging the clothes as I wore them. After the first month or so, I realized that pictures would make it much easier to pick the clothes. I spent about two hours taking pictures of most of my clothes.

Now it's super-easy to log what I'm wearing - I simply click on the picture or search for the description and log it. I do this every morning, although sometimes I still forget. It's easy to catch up.

It turns out that minor tweaks make a big difference. I used to sort the clothing by color so that I could see similar clothes together and maybe use colour theory to suggest

Sorting it by last-worn date was much better, though, because then I was encouraged to load-balance my clothes. That way, I wasn't always wearing the same clothes again and again.

WHAT ELSE?

I couldn't find an existing application that did what I wanted to do, so I'm glad that I built my own using a little scripting. Since I was looking at this page every day, I wondered: what else do I want to put on it?

Time Recording Tap Log Records

I'd been tracking my time using some apps for my Android phone. I started with Time Recording because it was great at exporting data. I'd been trying Tap Log Records too because it lets you note other things in addition to time.

I wanted to integrate time tracking into my dashboard, too, so I added a very simple time-tracking feature. It wasn't as fancy or flexible as the apps I used, but it worked the way I wanted to work.

Since images made it much easier to make clothing decisions, I looked for ways I could visualize time so that I could more easily make time decisions. I made a few bullet graphs to help me zero in on my targets.

Bullet graphs (image from Wikipedia)

A bullet graph is a compact graph that shows your thresholds and actual performance. That way, you can easily see where you are in the range and how far you have to go. I colored my graphs red or green to make it easy to glance at them.

In addition to the bullet graphs, I also visualized how I was spending my time. I wanted to see if my sleep times were all over the place (they vary a bit) and get a rough idea of how my day went.

When I was tracking clothes, I looked at this dashboard daily. Tracking time meant that I was now checking it hourly or even more frequently. That made it even easier to make tracking and reviewing part of my routines.

I also started using the time data as part of my weekly review and planning process. If I spent less time on a personal project one week, I tried to spend more time the following week.

© 2012 Todd McCann, Creative Commons Attribution Licence 2.0

So this was fantastic! I had this personal dashboard that made it easy to review and change my behaviour based on the data I was collecting. I wondered: What else could I add to this to make it even more useful?

My husband and I are big fans of the Toronto Public Library. We borrow so many items that it can be hard to track what's due, so I added some code to my dashboard to get the data from the library system and show me the next date.

Since I already had the data, I figured I'd get it to keep my reading history too. Knowing that we've checked out more than 500 items over the last six months makes me feel

We'd also signed up for a community-supported agriculture program some time ago, and I wanted to track just how much we received of each type of vegetable.

So I added that to my dashboard as well. Every time we received a box of vegetables, I weighed the vegetables and updated my dashboard. We used this to prioritize our cooking so that we remembered to use up old vegetables.

After a couple of seasons, I had a lot of data on what we received, what we ate, and what we ended up throwing away. Based on that data, we decided to try just buying our own vegetables. That's going well, too.

There are all these little tracking ideas that you might not find a pre-built application for. Sure, you can track them on paper or in a spreadsheet - those tools are very flexible.

But it's worth learning how to build a personal dashboard with your own simple tracking tools. That way, you can experiment with all sorts of ideas, and maybe even cross-reference your data.

You can play around with the way you review your data, and discover how you can use that data to make new decisions easily. When you make data part of the way you make decisions, tracking becomes a lot more fun -- and useful.

You might even decide to share some of your data publicly, like the way I do at QuantifiedAwesome.com. I share my clothing records just for fun. Ever since I started doing so, I haven't had a pajama day - I always want to have something up there!

You might even decide to share some of your data publicly, like the way I do at QuantifiedAwesome.com. I share my clothing records just for fun. Ever since I started doing so, I haven't had a pajama day - I always want to have something up there!

If you'd like to play around with some of these ideas, check out quantifiedawesome.com. You can actually register with a new account, Google, or Facebook, and try out some of these ideas. It's totally a hobby project, so I'd love your feedback.

But dashboards are very personal and you'll probably want to tweak things to fit the way you work, so I've also released the source code under the MIT license. Look for the "Source" link in the footer of quantifiedawesome.com

If I can help you with any questions or you'd like to bounce around some ideas, find me on Twitter as @sachac, check out my data at QuantifiedAwesome.com, or read my blog at LivingAnAwesomeLife.com. Happy to help!