Full transcript
So, in today’s show, I’ll share with you how I use my Apple devices to track both my professional and my personal life.
This topic is particularly important for entrepreneurs who want to stay on top of their business while keeping an eye on their personal well-being at the same time.
Before diving in, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the show.
I truly appreciate you fitting the Macpreneur podcast in your busy life.
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Among other things, you’ll learn how to operate your device faster and tame notifications which will make you more productive on the long run.
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So now, let’s dive into today’s topic.
I’ve chosen this one because I’ve been dealing with some health issues lately, mainly headaches.
And after a bunch of doctor’s appointments and a CT scan I’ve finally started to track my health more seriously.
It’s funny, because I believe I have quite a good grasp of what’s going on in my business but for my body, that’s a different story.
If you’ve been listening to the show since the beginning, you might recall that I’m tracking my sleep with a Fitbit for a few years now and for the number of steps, the Fitbit Charge 3 has been replaced by my Apple Watch beginning of 2018.
A few weeks ago, my wife asked me what I was doing with all this data, and, to be honest, I struggled to find a good answer and couldn’t find one that justified why I was tracking it in the first place.
This question combined with an accountability call I had two weeks ago led me on a quest for a way to track my health in a more meaningful way.
I think I have found just the right app for that and before going through it, let’s review the different categories of things that can be tracked and how to apply this for your business and your personal life
Leading vs. lagging indicators:
Useful link: https://www.intrafocus.com/lead-and-lag-indicators
A leading indicator tells us something before an event occurs while a lagging indicator tells us something afterwards.
In a long process, some indicators can be both leading and lagging depending from how we look at them.
Examples in the sales process:
- the number of prospecting phone calls you make = leading
- the number of sales conversation = lagging & leading
- the number of sales = lagging & leading
- the revenue = lagging
Examples at passport control:
- a queue = leading
- the average time to go through passport control = lagging
Examples for our health:
- the amount of carbohydrates we consume in a day = leading
- the fat pourcentage or the waistline = lagging
Actionable vs. Vanity metrics:
Useful link: https://fizzle.co/sparkline/vanity-vs-actionable-metrics/
Actionable = something you have control over and that allows you to make meaningful decisions
Vanity = something that looks good on paper and makes you or the outside world feel good about you
Examples of actionable metrics:
- The number of sales conversation
- The length of the queue at a till of the supermarket
- The number of steps you’ve walked today or since the beginning of the week
Examples of vanity metrics:
- The number of monthly unique visitors to your Web site
- The number of followers on social media
- The cumulative total revenue since you’ve started your business
- The number of tasks you’ve accomplished since using a new online service
- The number of 5K, 10K or half-marathons you’ve run in your life
Business context
Let’s apply this in a business context based on the different processes
- Sales processes
- Number of prospecting phone calls
- Number of sales conversations
- Number of sales
- Conversion rates (pourcentage of sales conversation leading to a sale)
- Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly revenue
- Profit per sale, per project, per customer segment, per individual customer
- Marketing processes
- Number of social media posts published
- Time spent on social media (interacting with prospects or commenting on other people’s posts)
- Time spent or number of interactions in forums or online communities where your ideal customer hangs out
- Operational processes
- Time spent travelling vs. time spent with your customer
- Time spent in after-sales support vs. time spent with your customer
- Time spent preparing for a customer visit or call and after the visit/call vs. the time spent during the visit/call
- Time spent on admin tasks vs. sales & marketing tasks vs. operational tasks
Tools we can use to track those indicators on our Apple gear:
- Spreadsheet:
- Calculation integrated into the CRM: Podio
- Time tracking: Toggl (Web app, Mac app, iOS app)
Personal life
Looking at our personal life, there’s a framework I like a lot which is called the wheel of life.
Useful link: Article on Wheel of life on MindTools.com
It’s a nice and visual way to categorise the different facets of our life:
- Relationships:
- Spouse or partner
- Children
- Family & Friends
- Health:
- Physical health
- Mental health
- Finance
- Leisure
Tools we can use to track those indicators on our Apple gear:
- Spreadsheet:
- Note app:
- Notes (password-protected)
- Microsoft OneNote (iOS app, macOS app)
- Evernote
- Journaling app (https://zapier.com/blog/best-journaling-apps/)
- Day One (Web app, iOS app, macOS app)
- Five Minute journal (iOS app, Physical journal)
- Time tracking: Toggl (Web app, Mac app, iOS app)
- Health tracking app:
Symptom Tracker app overview
Now, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the TracknShare app
Pros:
- Highly customisable and visual database
- Many different types of indicators
- Yes/No => Did you meditate today?
- Time => How much time did you sleep? How much time did you exercise today?
- Counters => How many times did you drink a full glass of water
- Number => How many calories did you ingest today?
- Visual scale with icon
- Pain: range of emoji faces from green to red with labels from none to worst possible going through mild, moderate, strong & severe
- Severity from low to high
- Not at all to very much
- Light to heavy
- Levels from way below normal to way above normal or low, medium, high
- Grades
- Completion level from none to fully completed
- Note (text only)
- Even the weather
- Some indicators are already created for you and you can create any you like and even add your own icon from an image in your camera roll
- Indicators can be grouped in categories like sleep, pain, health, food and can be visible in multiple categories:
- for instance headaches can be visible in the sleep and food categories if you want to try to correlate them with either the lack of sleep or the kind of food you eat
- Tracking is done on a daily basis and so it’s possible to look at the evolution of say, my headaches over the course of a day. And for each indicator, you can access a calendar showing its evolution over the course of a month
- Graphs:
- What sets this app apart from the other ones is the graphs section.
- For a given category, you can see the evolution of all the indicators, either day by day, week by week or month by month
- For the numerical and the scale indicators, you can specify if you want to see the average, the maximum, the minimum, the last value, the frequency
- You can also toggle between bar charts, line graphs and if available the icons (like the smiley face for headaches)
- At the top of show I mentioned I had a hard time explaining how the data I collected about my sleep was useful. Now it is, because I’m able to visually correlate the amount of sleep with the severity of my headaches for instance.
- Backup & export
- It’s possible to make a backup of your database to Dropbox or via e-mail BUT you need to do it manually.
- It’s also possible to export data by e-mail either in HTML or in CSV format, for excel
Cons:
- The app does not store or sync data automatically via iCloud
- The interface is not the most intuitive or user-friendly
Overall impression:
Being a data nerd, I love this app, but for people uncomfortable with tinkering a little bit, this app may be overwhelming.
Even though the integrated iCloud storage and sync is missing, there is less risk of privacy issues because the data resides only on your device, unless you manually export the database to Dropbox or via e-mail of course.
Price
The Symptom Tracker app costs €5,49 ($4,99) and there’s a free trial called TracknShare Lite which is limited to 12 entries per indicator
So, you can test the app and customise the categories and indicators, and see if you like it or not.
When you’re ready to switch to the paid version, simply backup the database from the free trial to dropbox or send it to yourself via e-mail
Then purchase the unlocked version of the app and re-import the database you created, either from Dropbox or from the e-mail
And voilà, you can continue tracking your health on your iPhone.
So, that’s it for today
I hope you found this episode useful somehow and you have a better idea of how you can use your Apple devices to track important indicators for your business and personal life.