Track Everything You Consume

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Documenting the podcasts I listen to, the videos I watch and the stuff I read. All in one place.

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I recently got into self-tracking. This is my own attempt at tracking everything I consume in terms of entertainment and education.

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I built this base with two things in mind:

  1. Making entries as frictionless as possible so that I would stick with it.
  2. Making it easy for others to get value out of it too, since I plan to publish it on my personal website.

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Here is a walkthrough of this base.

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Tables

There are 5 tables: podcasts, videos, reading, categories, and people.

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For podcasts and videos, the data I enter is the same, but I still wanted to keep them separate.

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For Reading, I have decided to combine articles and book chapters together. It's better for me because sometimes I skip around or donā€™t finish a book, yet I still want to document it. Also, thinking of chapters as articles makes a book less daunting for me.

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People and Categories are linked to the respective fields in the other tables. They give me a useful perspective of the first three tables combined. The ā€œtotalā€ field is a formula that adds the # of appearances. To do this I first had to create three hidden fields that turn the appearances into numbers, then make the formula that adds those numbers. (perhaps thereā€™s a method with fewer steps?)

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About Some Fields

Personal notes - there is no concrete use for this. Sometimes I write what I learned/remember and sometimes I talk about why I liked it. Sometimes I write intense notes and sometimes I leave it blank. The general purpose is to be able to look back and remember what it was about.

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Rating - I settled on a 6 star system. I rarely plan to use 1 and 2, since, if the thing is not good enough, Iā€™ll just give up on it. So itā€™s effectively a 4 star system. Iā€™m keeping it at 6 because when somebody else looks at a 1/4 stars, theyā€™ll think itā€™s a bad episode when itā€™s really not. 3 = perfectly fine while 6 = best of the year caliber.

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Using Zapier to Lighten The Entry Work

If you donā€™t understand how to use Zapier, I'd encourage you to just dive into it ā€” itā€™s pretty easy.

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Even with zapier, you still have to manually enter some data such as "people" and "notes" and "link". Once the record is created though it is a breeze. And fun!

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For reading articles, I use Pocket, so Iā€™m able to trigger a new record whenever I archive something. The things that could be automated are the title, date, author and link.

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If itā€™s a book chapter then I do it all manually.

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For videos, the trigger is whenever I add a video to my YouTube playlist called ā€œAirtable Videos.ā€ This automatically enters a new entry with the title, date, link and duration.

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For podcasts I have an RSS feed on listennotes.com. Every podcast I listen to is through this feed. (https://www.listennotes.com/listen/ericks-queue-z4X8EFsxbc6/?display=episode). So whenever I add something to this feed, it creates a new record on airtable using RSS by Zapier.

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Oh, and when using Zapier, to automatically enter the date entered you have to write {{zap_meta_human_now}} under date, when making the zap. They explain it here: https://zapier.com/help/modifying-dates-and-times/

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Other Comments

  • I am sorting the three tables so that the newest entries automatically go at the top.
  • If Iā€™m listening/reading something I want to make note of, I just quickly write it down on my Evernote app. Then when I make the entry later, I transfer those notes to Airtable.
  • I maintain this catalog by updating it every night. It takes effort but it's definitely worth it for me.

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Feel free to copy this base!

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Update:

I've since added two more tables. One for the movies I watch and the other for show episodes.

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If you know any way I can improve this base, or if you have any questions, feel free to reach me on twitter: https://twitter.com/ErickMullr

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Updated September 14, 2020 at 3:15 AM
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Erick Muller

I'm just a guy who likes to mess with software tools. Find out more about me at erickmuller.webflow.io
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