They say you don’t improve what you don’t measure and there are a ton of things I want to improve about myself! In the office we use Prometheus and Grafana to create dashboards to measure the health and performance of a variety of applications and services. They provide a ton of transparency and visibility into how we’re doing and it’s incredibly easy to spot patterns.

What if we each had our own personal dashboard that measured what was important to us? There are obvious ones such as health and sleep metrics but there can also be a ton based on productivity or life in general. For productivity, some examples may be the number of emails in your inbox or the average time it takes to respond to an email. For life it can be about how much time we’re spending with our families and friends or just pursuing hobbies.

Nearly everything we do can be measured with a little bit of effort and I love the idea of putting together a personal dashboard to measure what I care about. It will inevitably evolve over time as I think of new data to capture and plot but there’s something both empowering and clinical about seeing charts that reflect our lives.