{"id":151,"date":"2021-12-31T22:50:23","date_gmt":"2021-12-31T22:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fishbotwilleatyou.com\/blog\/?p=151"},"modified":"2022-05-10T06:44:55","modified_gmt":"2022-05-10T06:44:55","slug":"tasker-tracker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fishbotwilleatyou.com\/blog\/tasker-tracker\/","title":{"rendered":"Tasker Tracker: Daily Habit Tracking and an Excuse to Take Neumorphism for a Spin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve posted before<\/a> about my love for tracking and quantifying daily life. It’s a hobby I’ve kept up in one form or another since 2013, when I first started tracking my sleeping hours and caffeine intake as a college freshman in order to calculate a so-called “coffee-to-sleep ratio.” (This was something of a statistical El Dorado that lived on the lips of college students; as far as we know, caffeine is no substitute for sleep<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of rolling up three months’ worth of data into a single pretty chart that shows exactly how I’d been living my life, followed by a few minutes of self-absorbed pondering just what does that trend line mean?<\/em> The exercise isn’t always useful; much of the time, all that comes out of the pipeline is a series of beautiful plots of trends I already suspected and personal failings I already knew I had. But once in a while, the sight of my small wins and insecurities, digitized and laid bare in all their damning glory, is enough to motivate a real change of habit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Easy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These are the pleasures I’d like to introduce to you with the Tasker Tracker project. (If you’re feeling too lazy to read the rest of this intro, here’s a direct link<\/a> to the tool.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s It For and How Do I Use It?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Let’s get a few definitions out of the way:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Tasker<\/a> is a general-purpose automation app for Android. (Think of it as IFTTT<\/a> or Zapier<\/a>, but cheaper and more useful for individual users; in fact, this project started as a set of IFTTT recipes that quickly outgrew what IFTTT was capable of.) For example, Tasker can be configured to perform an action when you tap on a button or walk into a building. As of this writing, the app costs $3.49 on the Play Store.<\/li>
  2. Google Sheets<\/a> is a free spreadsheet app with a powerful charts interface. I use it for all my tracking because it’s so easy to play around with visualizations and manipulate the data in new ways.<\/li>
  3. Tasker Tracker is an online tool for generating Tasker configs for logging data to Google Sheets.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Tasker Tracker can track all sorts of stuff. Here are a few ideas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n