Collect data about yourself seamlessly, don't lean on discipline
I got talking with someone about collecting data on yourself. He was telling me how he logs the meals he eats through the claude.ai web interface and saves them all in one database.
I don't believe in collecting data on yourself through discipline. Discipline breaks. When you do something without really understanding it, without a big goal (and collecting observability data has no such goal by definition, the goal shows up later, once you've got the data and can pull something out of it), at some point you skip it once, and nothing changes. So you just stop doing it. That's why I try to collect data on myself seamlessly, with nothing to distract me, so it just happens on its own.
I've already pulled this off with video and books. I set up Jellyfin, BookOrbit for books, and I found an app that reads a book aloud in an AI voice: you press a button and it reads it out. Not perfect, it sort of has intonation but also sort of doesn't, but overall it's fine as a cheap audiobook. So everything I read or listen to gets logged: this book, at this time, for this long. When I'm working at the computer, that gets captured automatically too. All of it can be exported into one context database where you can see, by time, what I was doing when: reading a book, watching a show, working.
Next I want the same for my body. I'm going to drop WHOOP (they're great, but they don't share their data) and buy an Oura smart ring. That, the Apple Watch, and other wearables all feed into Apple Health, and from Apple Health into that same single database.
And in general, I think it's better (and more reliable in the long run) to collect data through a good app and pull it from there into one system, than to type it in by hand through a chat interface.
For what I eat, I could use Rayban smart glasses (though I don't know if they can stream), because having to snap a photo every time is discipline too.