Carragee Consulting

My search for a basic daily checklist app

I went looking for a tracker app and I found Google Forms is the easiest option.

Like so many others, I’ve hit a point where it’s imperative to make some changes to my daily routine to improve my health and the new year is a great time to finally act.

I wanted to write a custom list of daily activities to hold myself and a friend accountable to and then see a visualization of our consistency over the course of the year.

I assumed I would get an app and then extract the data to a csv and then make a pretty dashboard to compare our individual results.

Google Forms automatically includes a dashboards for single responses and an aggregate view as well as compiles the data into a corresponding Google Sheet.

I saved the form as an icon on my phone so I can easily navigate to it and fill in a new daily response. I already live out of Google Drive so it’s no trouble to get to the dashboard whenever I like and I was able to share admin rights with my fitness pal.

Over the years I’ve worked with Survey Monkey, Involve.Me and a few other survey tools that have useful features such as enable branching logic for questions, but the current functionality for Google forms seems like it covers a ton of simple use cases well.

Lessons —
1) This scenario reminds me of the value of an ecosystem rather than one off apps — I’m entrenched in the Google world with Drive, Gmail and Photos and a Pixel phone. it would take something monumental to force me out.

2) Don’t over engineer something that can be simple. Yes I could design a way better dashboard, but that will eat up time I should be going for a run or be outside and it will not make more more likely to consistently accomplish my daily checklist. The need was for an input screen that writes to a tabular structure, not a new data viz practice project.

Good luck to all on your goals for self improvement in 2024!