Thread by @EpistemicHope

I'm trying to set up a personal dashboard for myself, and looking for the best way to do this.

My first attempt was the simple thing: with google sheets. But this is already proving to be a pretty big pain.

Doing the computations for even one metric (time-length of my main deep work session, each day), is using tens of thousands of cells across multiple sheets, and when I change something, it takes multiple seconds to update.

There's a bunch of extra complexity because often the only way or the only easily legible way to do something in a spreadsheet is to spend whole columns storing intermediate results, where, in contrast, if I was doing with with python, these would be simple composable functions.

My guess is that I'm pass the point where the ease-of-getting started that google sheets provides is paying for itself, and I want to be doing actual programming instead (or maybe using some more specialized platform better suited to my task).

Does anyone have recommendations? What's the best way to go about this?

For context, I have a lot of personal data, and I would like to automatically import all of it, so that I can quickly spin up new visualizations as needed.

That data includes
- My daily review [google] form
- My [google sheets] daily checklist,
- My minute-to-minute time tracking with toggl (I also wrote a script that automatically adds this data to a google sheet)
- Software tracking my minute to minute computer usage.

- My oura ring data (though this is low priority compared to the other things)

I did have a keylogger on my machine as well, up until I upgraded my OS and apple, in their paternalism, decided that I wasn't allowed to have a key logger on my machine anymore (sidenote: if anyone knows a good, secure, way to track my keystrokes, that would be helpful.)

Basically, I want to make it so that all of this data pools, automatically, into one place where it is easy to look over, and for it to be easy to construct arbitrary graphs and indices that I can use to track things.

I want it to be the case that if a possibly important metric occurs to me, I can quickly look over my performance on that metric over the past 3 months, and then add it to the dashboard to track on a daily basis for as long as seems useful.

I will probably also need it to be easy to clean the data, because eg I'll occasionally see a 16 hour deep work session on a graph, which _actually_ means that I labeled some stop time with an AM instead of a PM, and I'll want quickly go back and edit that.

(With a note saying that I edited it, so I don't drive myself crazy.)

Is there some standard solution for this kind of thing?

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