My name is DogsOfWar and I’m addicted to charts and graphs. I like to think it’s because as they say, that which is measured improves and I’m trying to improve things. But I suspect it’s just part of my nature. I like to see trends and visualizations. Here are a few tools you can use to graph almost every aspect of your life.
Mint.com – Owned by Intuit, the same people who bring you Turbo Tax and Quicken, Mint allows you to track your finances across multiple sources from one website. Do you want to see your net worth over time, your income by month, track spending to budgets, how much you spend on dog food? Mint can do that. Want to see how your 401k is performing compared to the S&P 500? Mint can do that.
Fitbit – (and honestly any of the dozen other fitness trackers) – If you want to know what your activity looks like, what your weight and body fat percentage are and don’t want to keep a log book, just clip the Fitbit
You can even track your sleep, but I found that once you get the pattern recorded, there’s really no point in recording it on an ongoing basis.
Klout – Are you socially engaged and engaging? How would you measure that and track it over multiple networks? Fortunately Klout has you covered. You tell it what your various social media accounts are and they score your activity. They even throw some swag your way sometimes.
Google Analytics – Is anyone even reading that blog you spend so much time writing? I mean, you had three cat pictures, what more do people want? Fortunately Google Analytics is here to give you every morsel of data about your visits, what they click on, how long they stay, when and if they come back, how many of them there are and how how many of them there were.
