Personal Growth Command Center (LifeOS)

Hey! This is a personal project I built to help manage my job search, learning goals, and daily habits. I wanted to build something practical that actually solves a problem for me, while also practicing some data engineering logic.

Tech Stack

What is this?

Instead of setting up a full Postgres database and paying for hosting, I decided to use Google Sheets as a lightweight data warehouse. I built a set of automated workflows using n8n (on the free cloud tier) to extract data from my Gmail and Google Calendar, and push it into my Sheets.

This project shows how I handle ETL pipelines, branching logic, and upserts locally without any paid APIs. All the custom data transformations are written in standard JavaScript inside n8n Code nodes.

Data Structure

I structured my spreadsheet using a basic star schema with fact and dimension tables. Each table is just a separate tab in my Google Sheet:

Dimensions:

• dim_project (project_id, name, type, priority, status)
• dim_contact (contact_id, name, email, company, role, source, stage)
• dim_habit (habit_id, name, frequency, target_week)

Facts:

• fact_tasks (task_id, project_id, created_date, due_date, status, source) -> Depends on dim_project
• fact_applications (app_id, contact_id, project_id, applied_date, status, role, company) -> Depends on dim_contact, dim_project
• fact_habits (event_id, habit_id, date, status, notes) -> Depends on dim_habit
• fact_learning (session_id, project_id, skill, date, duration_min, source_url) -> Depends on dim_project

Other:

• alerts (alert_id, date, category, message, status)
• weekly_summaries (week_start_date, tasks_done, apps_sent, hours_learning, workouts)

How to use this project

1. Set up the Google Sheet

1. Create a new Google Sheet (I called mine LifeOS).
2. Create 9 tabs using the exact names from the Data Structure section above.
3. Add the column names to the first row of each tab and make them bold so n8n recognizes them as headers.
4. Grab your Spreadsheet ID from the URL (the long string of letters and numbers).

2. Set up n8n

1. Create a free account on n8n Cloud (or run it locally).
2. Go to Credentials and add your Google permissions (Calendar, Sheets, and Gmail).
3. Environment Variables: For the workflows to run automatically without modifying every node, set up the following environment variables in your n8n instance (in your .env file if self-hosting, or via the UI):
   • LIFEOS_SHEET_ID: Your Google Sheet ID.
   • LIFEOS_GMAIL_TO: The email address where you want to receive alerts and reports.

3. Import the Workflows

1. In n8n, click "Add Workflow" -> "Import from File" and upload the JSON files from this repo:
   • GmailJobsToApps.json: Scans new emails for job application keywords and logs the role/company into my database.
   • CalendarHabits.json: Pulls my gym and study sessions from my calendar automatically every hour.
   • ProjectsSync.json: Runs every morning to check if I have open tasks across my active projects.
   • DailyAlertsAndSummary.json: Sends me an email every morning if I missed my weekly habit goals or need to follow up on a job application.
   • DailyAlerts.json: Sends a deduplicated daily digest email merging data from applications, habit targets, and existing alerts.
   • WeeklyReport.json: Runs every Monday morning to aggregate the previous week's metrics (tasks completed, hours studied, workouts done) and emails me a summary.
2. If you didn't set up environment variables, manually go into each Google Sheets node and Gmail node to replace the ={{ $env.LIFEOS_SHEET_ID }} and ={{ $env.LIFEOS_GMAIL_TO }} expressions with your actual Spreadsheet ID and email address.
3. Activate the workflows and you're good to go!

Workflow Architecture Showcase

Gmail Job Tracker → Sheets Upsert

Calendar Events → Habit & Learning Logs

Daily Project Review Sync

Daily Alerts Digest (Deduplicated)

Weekly Metrics Report

Key Takeaways

Building this project gave me hands-on experience with concepts that come up constantly in data engineering interviews:

• Designing a star schema for personal analytics — structuring raw life data into clean fact and dimension tables, even without a traditional database.
• Implementing upsert logic without a database — using appendOrUpdate operations in Google Sheets to handle inserts and updates in a single pass.
• Handling deduplication and error alerting in ETL pipelines — building deterministic alert IDs and checking against existing records to avoid duplicate rows.
• Automating daily/weekly reporting with cron triggers — scheduling pipelines that aggregate metrics and deliver email summaries without any manual intervention.

Why I built this

I needed a simple way to track my job applications and study progress. By structuring the raw data into fact and dimension tables, I can easily connect the sheet to Looker Studio or Tableau later to build automated dashboards. It was a fun way to apply basic data extraction and pipeline concepts to my actual day-to-day life.

Future Improvements

• 📊 Connect Google Sheets to Looker Studio or Tableau for automated visual dashboards
• 💬 Add Slack notifications as an alternative to email alerts
• 🔗 Integrate with the LinkedIn Job API to auto-capture applications
• 🧠 Add an AI summarization step using a local LLM for weekly insight generation
• 📱 Build a simple front-end dashboard to view metrics on mobile