YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Serious questions:

Why do you try to track it?

Do you want to track it?

I don't know anything more about your condition than a few sentences from Google.

So I don't know if tracking would or would not provide useful information for making daily choices that mitigate symptom or if tracking would have substantial on medical treatment outcomes.

And most importantly, I don't know if tracking will or won't benefit your mental well-being. Everybody copes with chronic disease differently...both the physical /medical dimensions and the emotional/psychological ones. good luck.

> Im building something for this

You've probably answered your own question here. Welcome to the age of bespoke LLM coded apps where almost everyone can build the thing they want.

The reason these things did not work for me is because they were things I had to "do" as in remember/initiate so I made Crohn's AI - because its a program that runs and I just have to reply or answer when the AI-GIs contact me.

Intent: https://wiki.crohns.ai/agent/posts/ibd-biologic-therapy-init...

Program: https://crohns.ai/program/71174-eim-joint-pain-flare

Protocol: https://crohns.ai/protocol/71174

This allowed me to essentially set it and forget it until and each program is specific to each condition so its not just a dumb daily alert or something like that.

You can make yourself a program at Medicare.dev - just explain your situation or whatever and it should guide you through the rest.

I have an app I built for myself (because I couldn't find anything appropriate) to ask me questions via notifications like rating how I feel, how's my sleep, am I alert, eating well etc. its probablistic both in when it alerts and what it asks and I power a self monitoring dashboard off the back of it.

There were two key insights for me:

- too frequent or predictable and I'll ignore it

- always being reminded about something negative is bad for you

You didn't give a lot of information in your question; so that is my two cents.

> Is this a common experience or do I just have to be better at tracking?

I don't know anything about your illness, but I have Type 1 Diabetes, which is a pretty high maintenance chronic illness. Many T1Ds put a lot of effort into tracking their daily numbers and routines. For example, see all the settings in this popular third party continuous glucose monitoring app[1]. It does all sorts of tracking and monitoring and giving you feedback. My cousin is also T1D and uses some similar app to manage all this stuff, always putting in all her injections and food intakes and CGM data and using that app to make predictions and judgments. It's very useful for her.

I've tried these a couple times and they just don't work for me. I'll keep up with it for like two days and then skip a few entries and then just stop.

I think part of it is, I just don't find the output from all that input very useful. I've been diabetic for more than 20 years so I'm just kinda good at it and don't get much reward for all that effort. But also my personality is very detail-oriented and my daily routine is pretty stable, so for me personally, I just don't get the value from all the tracking that people with other personalities do.

So I guess for your situation, I would ask what you expect to get out of all this effort. Find a way to make the amount of effort you have to put in match the amount of value you want to get out of it. If it requires a ton of effort to do all this tracking and all you get out of it is a couple of charts that you don't care about, then maybe your particular situation doesn't justify spending that effort. If you do actually get some value out of it, but the effort is still too high, then maybe you can find a way to reduce the amount of tracking effort, even if the actual fidelity of the end results is somewhat lower.

Just some ideas from my parallel perspective. Good luck, chronic illnesses are a never ending adventure.

[1] https://navid200.github.io/xDrip/docs/Settings/MainSettings....

For tracking in general you need a system and a medium. The bullet journal method has worked well for me for many years. The systems and structures within the bullet journal change over time, but you can jump back years, and see what you were thinking at the time. More recently I have been using GTD within the bullet journal framework. I highly suggest reading at least those two methods before building your own system.

I have to track daily data for an illness. What motivates me to stay on top of it are the insights gained from the tracking. Being able to go to the doctor and answer questions definitively instead of anecdotally.

We've actually changed the therapy procedures based on the data and then been able to show it was effective with the data that came after.

So think about the insights the tracking will provide you and your doctor, and that might help motivate you.

We use old school paper and pencil. I have a clipboard with a tracking sheet created in excel with rows for each thing that needs tracking and columns for the day. Then I don't have to think, I just fill in boxes, and the pencil and paper are always right there on the wall in the bathroom, where the data is "generated" :)

This also lets me scan quickly across for daily and weekly trends. I have room at the bottom for longer notes if necessary. I put a [1] in the box and then a note that matches.

I've previously built a startup in this exact space (tracking of rheumatoid illnesses). We had a good collaboration with Charité Berlin, but it didn't take off as a business.

Happy to chat and learn what you're up to: hthh19xq@anonaddy.me