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:
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Here is a walkthrough of this base.
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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 donāt 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 ātotalā 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 thereās a method with fewer steps?)
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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, Iāll just give up on it. So itās effectively a 4 star system. Iām keeping it at 6 because when somebody else looks at a 1/4 stars, theyāll think itās a bad episode when itās really not. 3 = perfectly fine while 6 = best of the year caliber.
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If you donāt understand how to use Zapier, I'd encourage you to just dive into it ā itās 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 Iām 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 itās 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 āAirtable 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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Feel free to copy this base!
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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