My Personal Dashboard

I do a bit of volunteer work using my amateur radio skills. Sometimes this allows me entrance into community emergency operations centers or EOCs. They tend to look like NASA's mission control or at least what we see of it in movies. There are generally large screens showing all sorts of information that is helpful for dealing with an emergency that might be taking place.

Lately I have been thinking about information I find useful as I go about my daily routine. After all, I generally spend most of my day at my computer for work and have my personal computer next to my work one. I thought I would give a rundown of what my personal dashboard looks like in the hopes of giving others ideas of what might help them.

I would say that the most often visited application on my personal computer is my e-mail. About 90% of the e-mail I get is immediately deleted and so while I spend a lot of time looking at it, the information isn't that useful. 

Next I have my web browser open and have 4 tabs that I constantly view. It doesn't matter if it is summer or winter, I am always looking at 4 websites. One of those is weather.gov. This is where most news organizations get their information and so instead of picking my favorite local site, I just go to the source. In the winter, I focus on the forecast for Alta ski resort. In the summer, I shift down to my own neighborhood.

The second website I check is for my stock portfolio. Right now the market is pretty depressed and so I only check it daily. When the market is up, I probably check it 3 or 4 times a day. Naturally when I am looking to invest, I spend a lot of time here.

My third website is that of my YouTube channel. I like to see if I have any comments to respond to as well as see how many people are viewing any of my videos. I don't have a lot of daily views but it is interesting to see trends and how the weather effects the number of views. Let's just say that in May of this year I was seeing 8,000 views in a single day.

Finally I have this blog in the 4th tab of my browser. I don't check to see how many views a post is getting. Instead I keep the window open to remind me to post something every few days. I only get about 10 reads of each post and I never get any comments. This is in sharp contrast to my YouTube channel where I average around 150 views every day.

Inventorying what I have in my personal dashboard has me thinking. Are there any other tidbits of information I should be reviewing on a daily basis? Perhaps traffic? As I work out of my home, I don't see the need to keep a traffic map open. It is nice to know it is there if I need it though.