In my never ending quest to track all things, I’ve been looking into ways of gathering even more data about my day, my habits, and my workflow. I’ve been keeping a to do list for years (using Todoist), but it doesn’t do so much with stats. And really, there are days where I mark things off without actually doing them. Horrid habit, that, to be sure. But it does happen. So even if Todoist kept the type of stats I’m looking for, they wouldn’t be that accurate. And it’s an entire separate application - one that relies on the service of a third-party as well. Not ideal, to say the least.

So, I’ve decided that in addition to my general to-dos in Todoist, I’m going to start keeping track of a few habits. These are just going to be some things that I want to be better on. Things like blogging every day, and watching my calories, stuff like that. These things that will happen every day, and be tracked separately from my to-do list.

The question I had to answer is how? I’m sure there are apps that would do this on my phone or even on Linux. But I don’t want yet another application that I have to manage. Already, I have way too many. It’s time to pare things down a bit.

So, I decided I’d look into using Obsidian for this. As I talked about in my last post about Obsidian, I am fascinated by plugins, so I searched out a plugin for a habit tracker. There are several, but in the end I ended up using this video to build my own.

It was fairly easy to do so, and only took about 20 minutes. I do not know if it works yet, as it needs data to actually draw in the streaks and such. But it’s set up.

My goal here is to see if I can not only collect stats of things I want to improve on, but also actually improve on those things. None of this makes sense if I don’t actually make these things habits in the end. The gamification of the streaks should keep me somewhat motivated to do these things even when my lazy ass doesn’t want to.

I know I’ve been writing about Obsidian a lot, but this thing is going to be doing a lot for me. I want to see if I can consolidate my life a bit. Tone down on the number of apps I’m using, remove some digital clutter, and just tidy things up a bit. The more I can do that, the better off I think my life will be.

If you’d like to comment on this post, find me on the fediverse or email me. I especially want to hear from you about your own blogging adventures. And if you have a solution to my comment problem.