Bloom!

I’m pretty excited about this tiny little project I put together yesterday.

It’s… bloom!

I’m inspired by the Quantified Self movement and truly believe that self-tracking is a key habit, one that necessarily leads to positive behavior change and overall well-being.

For the last few months, I’ve been looking for a starter self-tracking project that I could build from scratch (i.e., use as a practical way to practice programming). Eventually, after complaining one too many times about how I don’t feel like I’m progressing fast enough in my career, I got the idea to start tracking just that—my professional progress.

A good, obvious place to start is skill development. It’s pretty difficult to appreciate how far you’ve come when you’re constantly facing all the things you still don’t know how to do. My hypothesis is that having a visual representation of work frequency will alleviate some of this newbie stress. In addition, it will probably make me want to “balance out my skill portfolio,” and I will spend more time working on things I’ve been procrastinating on lately.

I’ve actually tried doing something like this analog-style, with pen and paper. The problem was that it wasn’t a convenient way of self-tracking, and I would always forget to keep the little sheet by me and record my work at the end of the day. Making Bloom! live in an environment that I can easily access while working (via browser) or not (via phone) will [hopefully] help me form the tracking habit more easily. Also, this thing is public! Talk about accountability…

So there you have it, bloom! is my little foray into the world of tracking skills. Check it out! Every day I will log what skills I used/refined that day, and this little applet will visualize my progress with growing “blooms.” I’ll follow up in about a month to report on what effect this kind of tracking had on my productivity and time allocation.

Now go on, see how I grow.