Interesting discussion :).
My persona conclusion in short - to this intent for getting M-L-O ;):
Recommencation - keep all within one system, keep your current tasks and history in separate files; do analysis with XLS based on exported stuff from the history
Precondition
- you have folders set up which model your "life" - i call this the "garden of my life"; most methods recommend something like 7-13 areas
- define with the folders sub-folders for the main stable things you want to have in your life - i.e. house, fitness, health, good relationship, ...
- have no more than 2 layers.. deeper stuff i would defer to Mindmanager or similar as this is more tactical not MLO stuff
Implementation - tracking
- create repeating tasks for habits you want to form - frequency depending on the kind of habit
- in the recurrence advanced options disable the checkbox "do not create a completed copy of this taks on recurring"
- by this you get a log of when you performed the habit
- do you thing with the task
- every morning archive all tasks starting from yesterday... or later into an archive.ml file
Implementation - analysis
- export all archive into an XLS file
- and start your analysis magic - by using a pivot-table to drill into the data as needed
- by this you can create any sort of views on your past "performance" and get ideas across all areas of live
- reason for this recommendation - habits typically either support or contradict themselves, but one can only "see" this if you take a look all areas at the same time and look for the balance
..
My journey ;)
I landed with MLO as having all strategic things in one system is kind of key.
i did start with XLS, the switched to mindmapping, then built my own access based application to even integrate the file-system and other resources and then simplified by to MLO.
As MLO has a really good master - based on observation of the software - who is using MLO for himself and that is perfectly observable.
For example the views and how they enable the slicing and dicing of "your life" is genius. And the dashboard - although the name is missleading somehow ;) - is great too.
As you can for example define something for your idea as:
- top view all habits which are at hand for today
- bottom view - all related tasks which are derived or needed to perform the habit in a best possible way
- ... and so on
If you want to talk about the analysis part and what magic you can do with XLS to create great insights into your habit performance - happy to chat.
Most of the tracker apps have some sort of analysis means, but as soon as you want to leave the mainstream questions to your history you mostly end up lost in space ;)