How Naveen Keeps Track

Naveen keeps track. 

For a while, he had a personal API project where anyone could access basic stats about him like how many hours he slept at night, and how much he weighed in the morning. 

For over a decade, he's been recording quotes, and images, blog posts, and articles in a digital commonplace so he can always find them later if he needs them. 

He even tracks his family life: recording everything from packing lists, to gift ideas, to potential family outings in an Asana he shares with his wife.

But this theme of tracking extends far beyond his personal life, it also extends to his life's work.

In 2009 he co-founded Foursquare, the original location-based social network that allowed users to track places they visited. It's now a $100mm a year behemoth with more than 300 employees. 

In 2015, he launched Kit to allow creatives to keep track of their favorite products, and sold it to Patreon. 

Now a partner at startup-studio Expa, he's a peripatetic entrepreneur, hanging out at friends' offices while he looks for his next thing. (He keeps track of that too, logging people and meetings in a personal CRM he's created in his Asana.)

He's cool, in a subtle and compelling way. He speaks softly and carefully, curating sentences like every thought could be permanent. 

Because for someone who tracks things like Naveen, in a way, they are.

We sat down to chat about this theme of tracking in his life, and explore the systems he uses to start companies, and manage his family life.  

In this interview we cover:

- How he uses tracking to set and adhere to goals

- How he keeps a digital commonplace to record things that inspire him

- How he uses his Apple Watch to keep fit, and Streaks to keep his habits up

- What he does when he falls off the wagon

- How he balances his commitment to his family with his work 

- His addiction to Asana to help him plan his personal life and his work life

- The personal CRM he's built to help him find his next project

Let's dive in!

Naveen introduces himself

My name is Naveen. I'm an entrepreneur that has started a few companies in the past, including company called Foursquare. Presently I'm a partner in a startup studio called Expa.

I've been working in the tech world for almost 20 years now, starting with a couple of big companies way back in the past, like Lucent and Sun before I got into startups. 

When he started tracking things about his life

A lot of these concepts started way back in college, for me, with tracking books. 

Basically, I realized I wasn’t reading enough. I wanted to read more, and I wanted more diversity in my information diet. So I set a goal that I wanted to read 10,000 pages in a year. 

Back then I was just crudely tracking everything in Excel. And I just kept a log of books that I read, interesting passages, even ratings for the books. 

Doing this type of tracking helped me understand how I was doing relative to that goal. So that’s what was valuable about it for me.

But it’s not just about being goal-oriented, there’s another motivation too. I came up in a time when everything was digital, you know. And if everything is digital, and storage is nearly free, and cameras are making it easier to capture everything — I thought, why not just capture everything? It might be useful in the future; you never know. 

So that’s what I started to do. I even kept an archive of my old emails and stuff. Before Gmail existed, our email existed on various servers, and I would just download and keep it because you never know when you’re going to need it or want to look back on it.

He uses a digital commonplace book to keep track of what he reads

I use a commonplace book to keep track of interesting things I come across. It’s an idea that has been around for centuries now. 

My commonplace book is a private WordPress blog just for myself. And that's where I've been capturing snippets of things: quotes, PDFs that are interesting that I might read, a sign that I saw somewhere that’s interesting but wouldn’t post to Instagram, things that I might have heard at work, you know. All that's got to go somewhere. So I capture it in my commonplace. 

It's got a live URL, but I don't share it. I'm not sure how to deal with it. I’ve been asking myself, Should I share it? Should I not? So I've just kind of kept it private for now. Someday I might do something with it.

But it's basically a very simple WordPress blog. I don't need it to be fancy, right? There's nothing complicated that needs to go here. I kind of want to redesign the theme a little bit so that actually see the tags and or search on the right side. But for now I just want to capture. 

This is a poem that my wife actually found. She read it at her friend's wedding this past weekend. This Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote it, and it’s definitely shot to top ten best poems on my list. I was like, “How have I not heard this before?” So if I find something like that, I have to keep it.

The beauty of WordPress is that you don't have to overthink it. It's open source. They've been around for 16 years, they're probably going to be around for another 16 years. 

Whenever I use a tool like this I’m asking myself, are they going to be around? Is the datacenter going to be around? What is the data format? Who else is seeing my data?

I know WordPress is probably overkill for what I'm trying to do here. But it works. So why overthink it? 

He uses Pinboard as a link-based commonplace

The other thing I've been doing along those lines is collecting links into a central place. 

I’ve been doing this for a long time, since 2005. I started with del.icio.us, but right now I use Pinboard. It’s my link-based commonplace. It’s just an easy enough way to log whatever I come across.

I even have it set up to actually auto capture links from my Twitter as well. So anything I tweet or capture snippets of on Twitter automatically gets captured here. 

So using Pinboard I can go back to all of these old areas of my life, and see them. 

I used to work at a startup that got acquired by Sony way back in the day. So I can go back can see all the projects I worked on, interviews I did, the patent we had back then in 2005. All this stuff is just logged here going way, way, way back.