FYI: This isn't a rigorous post but an invitation to a dialog. Although my tone is critical, I am especially criticizing myself, who engages in some of this action as well.
Why engage in self-tracking?
In the programmer-y communities I'm part of on Mastodon and elsewhere it's pretty normalized to engage in self-tracking. It takes many forms, and many programmers like to build their own little tools to track themselves.
Let's talk about impact. Self-tracking is an alternate form of taking a selfie. At best it's useful for a sense of accomplishment ("Look at all this shit I did"), though I don't know why that would be particularly important. At worst it's an exercise in narcissistic navel-gazing. Yes, the irony that I'm tapping out these highly important words on a gemlog, lol.
These communities are already self-obsessed with the minutiae of code. Perhaps we should be coding less and doing other activities?
Self-tracking is not much different from the self-quantification 'movement', exemplified by hack Tim Ferris of The Four Hour Workweek, and later the Quantified Self. Again, I can't imagine something much more narcissistic than this entirely self-obsessed data driven group, especially one that already has an ego problem. And here I mean that society financially and emotionally rewards these brogrammer-kings.
Let's say you don't identify yourself within that group. You're a hippy farmer solar-grammer. Then why fall into the productivity trap that self-quantification invites? Productivity is a western obsession, an exemplar of the protestant work ethic. Do you need to obsessively track all the time you spent making changes to your projects? What's it good for?
* I'm constantly working and coding! For someone railing against productivity, what the hell am I doing? Even though I enjoy what I'm doing, maybe I should be doing other things beyond sitting on a computer all day like a fool.
* I have a mini text 'log' where I write about a tweet-length or so of what I did that day, a sentence or two. I did this for a few years on paper, stopped for 5 years, and then lately started again on the computer. I'm thinking of it as a memory aid, but even still, why is this important?
* I track my blood pressure regularly to show my doctor
