I’ve tracked a lot of things in my life. Here are some of the things I am tracking—or have tracked—over time.
Currently tracking
Blood pressure and resting heart rate
I have “white coat hypertension,” which means my blood pressure at the doctor’s office is always way higher than it is on a day-to-day basis. To that end, I track my blood pressure daily (along with my resting heart rate, because the monitor tells me that, too) and take the data to my physician for my annual physical to inform any high blood pressure medicine changes that might be called for. My June 2024 data, for example:
Exercise “check-ins”
Each day that I exercise, I post a Facebook “check-in” with an exercising-, eating-, or dieting-related comment, whose usages I track in a spreadsheet to keep from over-reusing them. I have a blog entry that explains how I manage the ~475 entries in the spreadsheet, which tracks how many times I’ve used one, the date of the last time I used it, and the dates of all subsequent uses. A few lines from the spreadsheet:
On average, I work out 6 days a week, usually taking off Sundays but sometimes swap out the day if I’m just not “feeling it” a certain day. As of November 2024, I alternate between doing cardio exercises (Workout A) one day and core and upper body strengthening (Workout B) the next day.
The percentage of original Facebook content that I post
I’ve set myself a goal that at least 90% of the things I post on Facebook be original content, which means it’s not just a sharing of memes, articles, or news items (for examples), but content I’ve created myself. There are 2 reasons I decided to do this: 1) There are already plenty of people sharing unoriginal content, and 2) I am a writer, and I love (especially) creative writing, and this is a great way to do some, especially being retired now and having the time to do it. For example, in July 2024, 96% of the things I posted on my Facebook timeline were original content:
Sentence-a-day diary entries
In 2014, I started keeping a diary in which, each day, I write one sentence (albeit some of them are very, very long—thanks to my friend the semicolon) about something that stood out that day. I haven’t missed a day in 10 years. It’s fun to look at the entries over the years for one particular day; for example, the entries for my birthday over the years:
Travel summaries by year
I’ve crated a web page to track the places I’ve traveled to over the years, a table for each year, each with headings of: Date, Destination, Accommodations, Transportation, & Comments. Many of the comments, especially in the earlier years, contain links to blog entries I made about the trip. These cover vacations, family visits, and business trips and covers trips over the last 40 years. This is 2024’s table:
Cruises we’ve been on
I’ve created another page that includes only the trips that were cruises. It includes the dates, the cruise line, the ship, the port calls, and some have notes about the cruise. Some of the entries also contain links to blog entries, if I made them for that trip. An example of a set of the entries that were BearCruises, which is a company that offers cruises for gay men who want to travel together:
Number of books I’ve read each year
I’m an avid reader, and I track all of the books I read on Goodreads, which as of November 2024, comprised 705 books. I also have a spreadsheet in which I’m tracking how many books I’ve read each year since 2015:
Write-ups for books I read
I create a web page each year for the books I read that year, and for each book, I devise a 10-word summary, 6-word review, overall rating, dates read, and some thoughts about the book. Three is a table at the beginning of the page with summary information of the book and a link to more details about further down on the page. I have pages for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 so far. Example of summary table from my 2024 books read page:
Example of a detail write-up for the 50th book that I read in 2024, James:
Book clubs
I’ve been in 3 book clubs over the years, and I track(ed) the books read in each book club.
- Mostly Social Book Club (MSBC) – 1992 to present. Here’s a snippet showing a few books we read in 2023:
- The Nematomes – 1991 – 2001. I’ve provided links to the schedules for each of the 10 years:
- GLBT Book Club – 2002 – 2003. These were the books we read in that short-lived club:
Haikus
I wrote a haiku-a-day every day for 2 years (2014 & 2015), and I’m currently doing it again for 2024. I’ve created a web page to archive them, which looks like this:
Reviews and statistics of the movies my husband watches
We have a website that has an entry for each of the movies that Bob watches, which includes the title, year, date watched, provider, a 10-word summary, a 6-word review, a rating, and a notes line, which mostly contains a couple of the actors in it, but sometimes other information, too. Here’s a glimpse of the site:
There is also a statistics page showing: # of movies watched by month, # of movies watched by decade released, # of movies watched by provider, # of movies watched by rating, # of ratings by month, # of ratings by decade, and # of ratings by provider. An example of one of those statistics charts:
Meal-planning menus
Each week we create a schedule of menus for the upcoming week. Bob keeps an inventory of what’s in each of our freezers, which we use to inform the menus, and then those menus inform the week’s grocery list if there are other things we need that aren’t in the freezer, like fruits and vegetables for sides. All of the menus are stored in a public Google doc folder, and we started them in January of 2021. Here’s what one looks like:
Have tracked in the past
Movies
I see very few mainstream movies any more, but I have a list of 236 memorable movies that I saw between 2004 and 2016, each with a link to a blog entry with what I thought of them. The beginning of the list looks like this:
Lectures I attended between 2000 and 2002
It’s a short list and here it is in its entirety:
Plays I saw between 1987 and 2005
As part of a web page called The arts, I have a listing of plays I saw between 1987 and 2005. Each entry includes the date (I’m missing a few), the name of the venue where I saw it, and some comments about it. Here’s what the beginning of the table looks like:
Operas that I saw between 2000 and 2005
Most of the operas I’ve seen have been with my friend Mary, who’s a straight women who can’t find straight men to attend them with her. This is the list in its entirety:
For several of the operas that Mary and I have attended, I created a mindmap of the plot, which we irritate the snooty folks sitting around us by doing “air checks” when something on the mindmap happens in the opera. We also both enjoy looking for typos in the subtitles. Here’s my mindmap for Rigoletto:
I also have a mindmap for: The Merry Widow, Tosca, and The Barber of Seville.
Concerts I saw between 1998 and 2006
As part of a web page called The arts, I have a list of concerts I saw between 1998 and 2006. Here’s the beginning of the table; those are links to blog entries for that event in the comments column:
A walking challenge
I kept a food diary, tracked my weight, and tracked my commitment to walk for at least 30 minutes throughout 2012, which I called my “Walking Challenge 2012.”
Calendared stuff
I track several frivolous things on my Google calendar, such as:
- When I change my razor.
- When I change my oil.
- When I get a haircut.
- Which anniversary it is of having rid my home of television sets, which I did in April of 2002.
- Which anniversary it is of my “coming out,” which I did on April 17, 1994.
Line-dancing and two-stepping
The line dances (both single and partner) that I know.
Grad school course work
My grad school experience, including course name, course code, instructor, semester year, type of class (i.e., application or theory), hours the class counted for, and my grade.
Last wishes
My ever-evolving end-of-life documents and last wishes.
Life-logging
My life—I have a blog entry for every day of my life from January 12, 2004 until January 12, 2014.
Movies
I track the movies that I see, with each title pointing to a blog entry that typically says: what theater, what time, and with whom I saw a movie, a synopsis of it, and in the more recent years, the trailer of it embedded, and then my thoughts and observations about the movie.
Moving & living
The places where I’ve lived in my life.
Physical activity
I use the MyFitnessPal app to log the calories I eat when I’m dieting. I also use it whenever I exercise to track if I did cardio or strength training and how many minutes and calories burned for that session.
Reading
Books that I’ve read as part of three book clubs over the years:
- The Nematomes (1991-2001)
- The Mostly Social Book Club (1993-present)
- A short-lived (1-year) GLBT Book Club, (2002-2003).
Travel
The places to which I’ve traveled—including place, date, lodging, airline taken, and links to respective blog entries I wrote while there. List definitely needs some updating for the most recent years. 🙁