Easy tools for self-tracking: Tap Log

The first thought for me when starting the tracking was that it either must be automatic, or extremely easy. I simply don't have time or motivation to fill in manually complicated and long web form to track what I eat or how much do I exercise. 

When I started my logging project my first goal was to find right tools for tracking. I had three request for the tools:

1. They  need to work on my Android phone
2. They need to be extremely fast and easy to use
3. There has to be an option to export data to excel (or some other general format)

I have already used Endomondo for tracking my exercise, so I needed a generic tool to track rest and eating. There are quite a many specialised apps for tracking that, but many seem quite complicated and don't have export option. 

The easiest app I found for Tap Log which looks really promising after a couple of days testing. The idea of Tap Log is that you can easily log anything in 5 seconds. You can create things you want to log and then create logs really fast. 

My idea was to track at least in the beginning things in five main categories:

1. Food (in general, how regular is my eating, not calories etc. I eat)
2. Sleep (how much do I sleep and what is my sleep quality)
3. Exercise (probably I still will use Endomondo for this)
4. Free time (what I do in my free time, for example how much do I spend watching TV)
5. Work (some work related things)

I then created things I want to log in each of these categories, for example in Food category I added the following things:  

Creating all the categories and things to log is extremely easy in Tap Log. Creating the structure I described above took me maybe 10 minutes. And then everything is ready for logging. 

You can log three different kinds of things in Tap Log:

1. Quantity (in other words, any number)
2. Rating (a 1-5 stars)
3. Text (any free text you type)
   
   

Logging happens in Tap Log by tapping the thing you want to log. Then a new screen opens where you enter the value you want to log, for when I want to log water I drink (quantity) the following screen opens:

I enter the amount (for example 2, if I drink 2 dl of water), and then tap Log. It takes about 10 seconds to open the app and make log entry. Easy and fast, just like I want it. 

When you make logs you can also of course check the entries you have made. It looks like this:

And of course, you can easily export all date to Excel-format and share it where ever you want to, I use Dropbox. 

So this looks like quite a promising way to start logging information about things I want to know about. Next steps would be to log this information for a while, then check what the data looks like in Excel and how what I do matches my goals. I probably also need to find a bit more detailed way to log what I eat and details about my exercise.