> the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept introduced by Apple/Google so they could scrape a huge percentage in sales.

Actually, when the iPhone was introduced, Apple wanted it to have only a few select native apps (like Maps or Mail) and all the rest to be web apps.

They were browbeaten into opening an app store by the developers, who wanted to do native apps, not the other way around like you say.

Sure, I use ATracker (https://atracker.pro/)

They have phone apps for both iOS and Android which work offline. Their iOS app has a "companion" on the Watch too, so you can quickly switch activities on your wrist. I think without this I wouldnt have the patience to even track bathroom time (another thing that I vastly overestimated before I saw the numbers).

I´m still hovering between writing my own tracking system, for more control, and the convenience of a pre-made system. I would most miss the watch app, I think, as I have no idea how to make that.

Possible compromise would be to use this app but automate the data export and analysis in my own custom environment.

But yea, long story short, Atracker, and offline works well.

I‘ve been doing sth similar by tracking my time for the last 3 weeks and change. I havent done the full analysis yet but it‘s already clear that how I think I spend my time is completely different from how I actually spend it.

Perception/„feeling“ vs physical reality. The gap is huge.

Trivial example, I was convinced that the „time toll“ i have to pay around training was very high. Like I was spending an hour or more just to change into sportswear, shower afterwards, and switch back. This perceived deadweight loss always presented an additional psychological hurdle to get off my ass and train. Now that I know that it‘s much less than I thought, it‘s gone.

Similar for cooking.

Like I said, havent done the full analysis yet but I can already highly recommend this practice of recording time at least for a while.

I´m in the same boat and I think it boils down to this: some people are actually quite passive, while others are more active in their use of technology.

It`d take more time for me to flesh this out than I want to give but the basic idea is I am not just sitting there "expecting things". I´ve been puzzled too at why so many people don´t seem to get it or are so frustrated like this lady, and in my observation this is their common element. It just looks very passive to me, the way they seem to use the machines and expect a result to be "given" to them.

PS. It reminds me very strongly of how our parent generation uses computers. Like the whole way of thinking is different, I cannot even understand why they would act certain ways or be afraid of acting in other ways, it´s like they use a different compass or have a very different (and wrong) model in their head of how this thing in front of them works.

Abstract:

Physics, as a fundamental science, aims to understand the laws of Nature and describe them in mathematical equations. While the physical reality manifests itself in a wide range of phenomena with varying levels of complexity, the equations that describe them display certain statistical regularities and patterns, which we begin to explore here. By drawing inspiration from linguistics, where Zipf's law states that the frequency of any word in a large corpus of text is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table, we investigate whether similar patterns for the distribution of operators emerge in the equations of physics. We analyse three corpora of formulae and find, using sophisticated implicit-likelihood methods, that the frequency of operators as a function of their rank in the frequency table is best described by an exponential law with a stable exponent, in contrast with Zipf's inverse power-law. Understanding the underlying reasons behind this statistical pattern may shed light on Nature's modus operandi or reveal recurrent patterns in physicists' attempts to formalise the laws of Nature. It may also provide crucial input for symbolic regression, potentially augmenting language models to generate symbolic models for physical phenomena. By pioneering the study of statistical regularities in the equations of physics, our results open the door for a meta-law of Nature, a (probabilistic) law that all physical laws obey.

(my emphasis)