I am a pretty thirsty person, unable to work without water supply next to my desk. When I still lived in Germany I would have a 6-pack of 1,5 liter PET water bottles next to my desk. Always ready to gulp down.

I never counted how much I drank but my family and friends made jokes about me and told me that it is unusual to drink this much water. I don't know if it's true. I just like to be hydrated well and cannot think when feeling thirsty. I know I am pretty boring but I usually don't drink tea or coffee. I just like to drink water. And yes, it can taste quite different. My favorite mineral water is Elisabethen Quelle from Germany.

Experiment

One of the most used journals on Futureland is the water journal by Vin. It is described as:

Internet friends trying to drink more water together. Drop an emoji when ya drink a glass! Your stats will show you how much water ya drink.

I think it is a fantastic idea and cool Futureland use-case but as I never had problems staying hydrated it never appealed to contribute.

In May I played around with Siri shortcuts for the Futureland iOS app and released a Futureland shortcuts integration a few days later. Since then I started to use the shortcuts integration for a bunch of my journals as they provide faster ways to publish. I got curious how I could use all of this to track my water intake.

I live in Indonesia right now and 6-packs of 1,5 liter bottles are not available. People usually buy a gallon of water and use a cooled dispenser for their hydration needs. Because for water I prefer to drink out of bottles I bought myself a 500 ml stainless steel hydration bottle. While working I usually have to refill it at least once an hour.

Shortcut

To make tracking of my water intake easier I created the following iOS shortcut.

First it creates a new entry on the water journal with the content 500 ml. Afterwards it logs a new health sample into Apple Health for the statistics.

Tracking

I wanted to keep the amount of work for this experiment as low as possible. I am pretty pleased with the result. The only thing I have to do is to press one button on my Apple Watch every time I my bottle is empty. There is no menu, no waiting time, nothing to keep in mind. By now it became a habit. You can see the shortcut button in the bottom right corner of this screenshot.

Results

In general Apple Health provides a nice way to look at all kinds of health data. For water this is not really exciting but it does the job. Additionally it shows a bunch of useless data like

You drank water on 7 of the last 7 days.

and

You drank water on 28 days in the last 4 weeks.

In the last 4 weeks I drank on average 3,3 liters every day. This means on a usual day I refill my bottle 6-7 times. A gallon of water in Indonesia holds 16 liters. So I have to go to the store every 4 days to buy a new one or risk running out of drinkable water.

Future

I don't plan to stop tracking my water intake for now. There really is no friction logging this and the current lockdown over here makes it pretty simple to drink nothing else. I am curious to see what I learn from tracking my water intake for one year or even longer.

I drank one liter of water while writing this entry.