“Perfection can be achieved more quickly by improving your worst skills. Because its marginal revenue would be greater.”

Nowadays people are really lost in the details. They loose themselves in working, self-centred communication (you don’t actually communicate while you tweet, do you?), and thanks to online social networks, in other peoples’ lives. It’s like being under the influence of drugs. Time passes by so quickly and things sometimes may go very bad but you can’t tell why.

Maybe we can use the technology to overcome its side effects. A good treatment starts by a good diagnostics. So if you can get a good bird-eye view of your life and your goals, you may be more efficient and there are tools for that.

First group of tools is called goal tracking. With goal tracking, you can set up a tangible goal for anything, and you can record every step towards it so you can monitor and take precautionary act if necessary. The goals can be weight loss (x kg), performance goal for sports (x km under y min, x km per week) etc.

Life monitoring tools represents the second group. They look like goal tracking tools but in essence the main aim of these tools are only logging activities to cultivate possible useful information. Monitoring can be done for,

  • exercises
    • sports
    • music
    • mind (meditation, playing chess etc.)
  • what you eat
  • sleep (hours slept or even the full report of the iPhone app sleep cycle)
  • financial (what type of things you buy or pay for, how much you save, what financial decisions you make)
  • mood (how do you feel?)
  • places you have been (foursquare like)

Last group of tools are based on Seinfeld’s calendar log. They help you to log what you have accomplished every day. It can be very motivating. For example this blog is like a Seinfeld calendar to me. I feel like I have to write my ideas for every couple of days. So far it works.