Consumption

I’m a data guy.

I have a masters in Data Science.

My friend Hannes Elvemyr once introduced my to Toggl. An app to keep track of how you spend your time, essentially letting you timebox everything you do. I jumped on it immediately and spent the remaining 4 years of my college education timeboxing everything I did related to school and side jobs.

Since 2011 I keep manual track of all my finances. It means that I add every transaction that ever occurs in my day to day life to an app for centralized data location. In the beginning I used the iOS app Mina Utgifter/My Wallet+, a number of years ago I instead switched to My Finances.

Usually people think I’m nuts, but my rationale is that with several sources to consolidate and the major banks classification algorithms still being so-so, and not particularly granular, the manual tagging/categorization/consolidation is still much better than what I get from out of the box applications. Plus the manual overhead forces me to think about my consumption one more time than if it just happens, as for example with Tink, or at least what they used to be. I should note that I originally got the idea from Andy Stanley.

So, to me it just seems natural to track my media consumption as well. I tend to forget the niceties and takeaways from books and movies I’ve read and seen. So my long-term vision has been to go from highlighting within the books, to writing brief summaries for my own benefit. Better to reread a 20 sentence statement than a 200-page book.

But, since I’m not quite there yet, why not do an intermediate step? So I decided to launch an extra page on this site, where I track all of my media consumption. The list is by no means (and probably never will be tbh) extensive on the material I have consumed. But it serves as a starting point for what to review and revisit in this vast Multiverse. Besides, I really believe in those small additions of simply jotting down something you did, journaling with a sentence per day, or even a single word per day, is a lot better than nothing at all.

By the way, I did 1-sentence journaling for a number of years, roughly 2009-2017, but unfortunately I felt I couldn’t keep up just before my wife and I got married, and fairly subsequently bought an apartment and had our daughter. Bummer! Basically I opted out of the most event-rich moments of my life. I’m fairly certain I’ll regret that for quite a while.

I could of course opt in to brief journaling again, but the many nights I spent trying to catch up on a week of missed days doesn’t really feel feasible now with a full time job, and family relations I want to stay healthy. Better a brief interruption with a post like this every once in a while.