So you know from my last post that part of what I’m doing this year is getting serious about diet and fitness; I’m pleased to report that so far it’s going really well. I owe part of my success to the fact that I am a consummate geek, and nothing gets me committed and organized like a good list.

(Fellow geeks are nodding their heads in righteous agreement. Anything that can be tracked and logged is a good thing, am I right?)

So I have this iPhone app now that allows me to track my food intake and my exercise, and it tells me how much I can eat each day and looks up the calories for everything and even tells me how many calories I burn when playing Dance, Dance Revolution on the Wii with the kids. (Hint: Not nearly as many as it feels like. Sigh.) Thanks to this app I am becoming positively pumped about the changes I’m making, because while eating a handful of Hershey’s kisses is satisfying, so is logging that bowl of air-popped popcorn and discovering I actually ended the day with calories to spare.

After a couple of days of tracking I realized that the glee I felt with each entry was somehow familiar. And then I figured it out: It’s similar to how I felt when I first started using Quicken in earnest to track my business revenue and expenses. Again, the geek in me enjoys the charts and graphs and orderly logging of relevant information.

So… I use Quicken to track my money.

I use Lose It! to track my fitness.

Both my money and my fitness are in pretty good shape, right now.

Might it stand to reason that everything in my life could be improved with a tracking/logging method?

I know there’s software to allow freelancers to log time spent on various projects. I’ve never felt the need to use such a thing because so many of my projects are sort of 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there while on the phone for something else, etc. Plus I feel like it might be hard to log everything. I mean, I can see myself adding a lot of extra categories. Like, time spent sifting through my spam folder to be certain nothing important fell in there. Or the time I spend on email that can’t be directly tied to one specific project, as many things are relevant to two or more projects. Or the time I spend throwing a ball for the dog when I can’t think of anything to write.

(Uh, maybe logging that last one would be a bad idea….)

But… but… think of the possibilities! I already do meal-planning each week; maybe I could log exactly what I’ve cooked and spreadsheet it all and find a way to make it randomly generate menus for me based upon what we generally eat!

I could chart which parts of the house I’ve cleaned, and become more efficient in my routine! Except for the part where I don’t really have a cleaning routine, and other than the kitchen and bathrooms I tend to just clean once an area looks too disgusting to ignore anymore.

I could log what I wear every day, and then the next time I get it in my head to do one of those big closet clean-outs where I’m supposed to toss anything I haven’t worn for a year, I would actually know what I haven’t worn for a year!

It’s possible I am a little too excited about this.