Tracking all those Bottles, Diapers and Formula

Now that our days are all about eating, sleeping and pooping, I wanted an easy way to track this. Of course the simplest thing to do would be to download a baby tracking app; I'm sure there are great ones out there. But I couldn't resist rolling my own with Tasker and Google Sheets.

Here's what I did. First, I created a new task to track a generic 'baby event.' The task depends on two useful plugins: Tasker Spreadsheets Plugin and Mail Task. The former plugin allows for writing data to a Google Sheet, the latter allows Tasker to send e-mail. The only thing resembling a complication in this plugin is that I need a Google Sheet friendly timestamp. To get this, I did a string replacement on the %TIME variable to convert '.' to ':'. I then added in the %DATE variable to get a timestamp.

Once I had this general purpose logging task, I made a series of specific tasks. Each one contains a Perform Task action which calls the main task.

Finally, I setup a widget page on my home screen to host a series of Tasker widgets. Each one logs a different event:

Now, logging nap time is as easy as clicking the appropriate icons. If only putting the kid down for a nap was this simple.