Lifelapse | Intro

@visualizevalue

I’m working on a time machine, going to release it later this year.

If you’re anything like me, the most powerful meaning we can get out of life is a theme.

A theme that holds everything together, a story you can tell, progress & memories you can show.

These are the type of things that are going to be here when you’re old.

These are the type of things that are going to be here when you’re gone.

Think about it: the most permanent thing we have today is the internet. An infrastructure that 25 years ago nobody knew nothing about, now holds all of our identities, collective knowledge & external brains. And it’s only getting stronger; with new versions, intelligent capabilities, decentralization and cloud distribution. When I first got enrolled in a formal computer science degree, I didn’t quite see all of this. Not because I was just getting started, but because 9 years ago we really didn’t have what we have today; I’ve eventually come to learn that even if 9 years ago I was mastering some niche/toolset/tech stack, it’s probably totally out of date now. So it wouldn’t really make a difference as to when did I start. Which makes me feel super lucky to engage at right about these times; times that I imagine will forever be of great significance.

Affected by that thought I like to think that we’re all really lucky, and I don’t see more suited point of history at which passion can pay off given what you currently have under your belt with today’s technology. I feel like now I get it, I get why small groups of people seem okay with the idea of maintaining a year-long tunnel vision working on some extra niche product. It takes some success with money for us younger folks to know that money ain’t the end of the road and that what you’re working on is 100 times more important than the amount of money you’re making. Because at some point, when you’re thinking about balancing life & work, peak success is where work feels like play and where work is no longer something monotonic. It’s like you have to unlock some basic level in your career where you can make some good money to live comfortably and get your mind clear to think higher levels. And at which you deeply explore what’s your purpose. Your life’s work, your chosen path, the few things you’re comfortable doing for the rest of your life because at this point it’s more of a message, a legacy.

They say that you can know a lot about someone by looking to their spouses, careers, where they live & how they treat people. I would like to add: And how well they maintain their passion towards what they’re doing. It’s not about discipline or any of this stuff, I like to think of it as higher level: WHY do we really do what we do? Why are we working on what we’re working on? If we’re constantly optimizing for wealth, what do we know about wealth?

Lately I’m shifting focus more than I should; I’m trying to maintain a good schedule around my desk & work sessions. I’m doing everything I can to maintain focus and get into flow more often.

Currently I’m working on a digital time machine. A tool you can use to hop at any day in your life and instantly remember how you were doing, who you were with, your physical & mental state, your biggest focus, your soundtrack, your time spent, your notes & your overall performance.

I want to emphasize on why, for me, this is peak life: Like I said earlier, the most powerful meaning we can get out of life is a theme & a story, and I’ve been always trying what tech has to offer to do exactly that! Connect and have control over my days, where were I am, where did I go from there, and where am I heading. Connecting & visualizing days & progress with each other, like a series. My aim was simple: Log everything I can!

If you think about it, the “journal” premise is just about the same. A journal or a diary is trying to help you have control over your days and be more mindful when it comes to the lingering, the changes, the progress. A journal is essentially trying to associate every new stimulus with a result, like one big monitor where you are performing an infinite amount of experiments, trials & errors, while learning about life, people and yourself in the process.

Journaling is one activity that pays most dividends over time, it helps your understand yourself and it helps you grow everyday. Now that’s good & all, but what’s not good, and what really stops me every damn time I’m trying to maintain a journal is one thing: FRICTION. Maintaining a journal is a high-friction habit. Meaning in order to be effective, it needs to be a part of your day everyday, and you have to dedicate the headspace and manually do the writing, whether digital or analog. And even for digital journals, the maximum streak I could ever maintain was about 3 months, after which I get caught in life, and never continue.

The time through which I go through my limited older journals can easily be some of the best moments of my life. Instantly you travel in time and see your older self talking to you now, literally like a handshake through time & space. You see yourself dreaming, talking to people, going places & envisioning where you’d want to be and what you’re trying to achieve. When you do it from a place you dreamt about visiting, the handshake feels like a dream, because we tend to forget. We forget about what we dreamt of, and we forget our thoughts & aspirations. Our biological brains can’t simply keep a log of every thought or dream you have every day. But an external one can, if you can fight friction and be dedicated enough to write everyday. BUT, this wasn’t me. I didn’t journal everyday.

So, given that we don’t like friction but we also need to remember our days, I was thinking about the ways we normally default to when we try to remember a specific day. That’s a good exercise, give yourself a minute to think, what do you normally do to remember a given day? Maybe check your photos app? a quick search with the day/month in iOS/Google photos gives you a view with the photos you took that day, what else? You open your instagram story archive maybe? Your WhatsApp chats? Is there any other prominent way to remember a day?

In my efforts to answer this question, I spent lots of time trying to make tech work for me.

The end goal: To be able to remember what & how I was doing, thinking and performing on any specific day.

I tried to use apps & methods that can help me manually log several aspects of my life and through which I can search and hop back at any point of time.

I don’t want to go through all the experiments I did through the past few years, but, put together, I found out there were several levels to my tracking:

Level 1 — Apps/Services that enable you to track & search your timeline for just 1 aspect:

• Trackers: tracking sleep, tracking workouts, tracking finances, tracking location history, tracking screentime
• Events: integrate all events & meetings into one calendar that I can search/view
• Notes: put a date on my notes, link them together when I can
• Music: spotify activity & stats services
• Manual entries: mood, energy level, nutrition information (myfitnesspal, etc)

Advantage: You can find accurate info about any day easily just by opening & searching the respective app.

Disadvantage: Lots of apps to use everyday! Easy to get lost between different data, high friction!

Level 2 — Automating different functions:

• Save health data (sleep, workouts, steps) for everyday into an excel sheet automatically
• Save my location history data & spotify activity to the same sheet automatically
• Sync all my notes, reading highlights and web highlights in a folder on my disk automatically
• Sync my computer & phone screentime as well as activities I’m working on, automatically
• Sync my favorite photos of each day (from iOS favs) to the cloud, and then to a database, automatically

Advantage: Easy to maintain, minimal friction, lots of automation tools and free APIs to help you.

Disadvantage: Extremely technical! In order to build & maintain a system like this, you have to be more than tech-savvy. You have to find your way around writing scripts, exploring API docs & building pipelines.

Level 3 — Centralizing your life’s dashboard, into one platform:

One view that has everything in it, zero-to-low friction, select a day in the time machine to instantly view information about your body, mind & memories. Enables you to:

1. View high level info about your life, aggregated stats about your days, weeks, months & years. Like Spotify wrapped.
   Do you know why people love Spotify wrapped and wait to see it every year? Because it’s all happening in the background and they just trust that there’s an automated report through which they can know themselves better.
2. Dive deep into any of the tracked stuff. Ditch the high-level and take a closer look into that journal, that workout, that meal or that outing from 2 years ago.

Principles:

1. Everything is as automated as possible (through integrations)
2. User has full control over data (via exports and/or APIs)
3. Aimed for the non-techies, zero technical experience needed
4. UI components are interactive whenever possible

Not a:

• Habit tracking app
• Journaling app
• Fitness app

More like a:

• Dashboard
• Decision-making helper

Advantages:

1. Almost everything is automated, checks our initial goal of “instant time travel”
2. Track activities, run experiments & make smarter decisions
3. Holistic view about your digital & physical self
4. Monitor everything about your mind & body in one place