Thursday, September 30, 2010

Oh Life – A Super Easy Online Journal Tool

I've been using Oh Life for a few weeks now with great success.  It's very easy to use.  They send you an email each evening (or whatever time you specify) that basically asks, "How'd your day go?" and you reply to the email.  It then keeps everything in chronological order and you can log in any time to read past entries.

 

Today, I thought of putting a twist on it that some of you may find helpful in trying to achieve your fitness and diet goals (or any other goals for that matter.)  In the spirit of Atul Gawande's awesome checklist article, I'm going to leave a checklist near my computer so I can respond to the following each day:

 

1.) What happened today?

2.) What did I eat?

3.) Did I work out?  If so, how and for how long?  If not, why?

4.) How were my emotions and my psychological state today?

5.) How much money did I spend today and on what?

6.) Any other specific questions about long-term goals or projects I'm working on

 

I think this will be a great way to kill several birds with one stone.  Experts always say to journal about this or that to introspect, stay on target, stick to your diet, watch your spending, etc.  Why not do it all at one time and in one place?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like the checklist. Very good.

Anonymous said...

I signed up for it today - I wonder if they will make it so you can add those things to the email they send out? Customize a list so you address it each day. That may be a good one to suggest. (Sherry)

Rendall said...

Security is lax or missing on Oh Life. Since they are able to email you your own old entries, they do not encrypt your entries in their database or they are able to unencrypt them.

No doubt they are nice guys who care about your privacy, but if they get hacked, your journal entries are vulnerable.

Best practice would be for them to use your password to encrypt your entries, and to encrypt your password so that even they do not know what it is. That way if they are ever hacked, your information is protected. That would mean, however, that they could not email you your own journal entries.

It's a really neat service, though. If that doesn't bother you (and there's no reason it necessarily should), then I highly recommend it!

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