Partially inspired by Kottke's "media diet" posts and also out of a desire to quantify my life a little more in 2025, I started the year building out a basic spreadsheet in Google Sheets to track everything I watched or read. Theoretically, I already had this for books, but none of the candidates for other TV/Movies really did what I wanted, so I just resisted my initial urge to write a web app for everything and just made the spreadsheet.
I also added a separate spreadsheet for tracking my exercise in 2025.
Dear Reader, it did not go well to start. It did not go at all. In fact, while the media spreadsheet had a solid 30 entries or so by mid-February. Pretty pathetic, honestly, but I had not yet figured out how exercise fit into my WFH life. My day was pretty straightforwardly bookended by the kids getting on the bus for school at 8am and getting home off the bus around 4pm. For a while when we first moved to Georgia, I would take a walk a couple of times a week around the neighborhood, typically at least a mile, but often three. It's pretty easy to convince yourself that you don't have time for that kind of walk once school starts and the effective workday basically has to fit in that exact eight-hour window.
Eventually, I did figure it out, with the nudge of a not great diagnosis from my physician and a great idea from my sister. For the last four months, I've worked out basically every day (occasionally interrupted by trips, but even then I at least tried to get my steps in). I try to get at least 30 minutes on the walking pad every day, and I have typically settled in to about 35-40 minutes on average. On weekend mornings, I try to aim for an hour.
I've found the quantifying really useful for my old-school ADHD brain. I can sort of always convince myself that I'm doing stuff at least "fairly often", but reality often tells a different story. So far this year, I've got about 120 workouts in after recording FOUR in all of 2024. I've managed to lose 10-15lbs so far (fluctuates, of course), but I think I could lose 35-40 in total. My physician tends to agree. The "media diet" data is probably less interesting, but I'm not sure that I'd be at the moderately healthier point I am now without that first instinct to quantify the data.
The media diet instinct is also more or less directly responsible for the existence of this new site, but I will save that story for my next post.