I’m obsessed with data and have often found ways to use it to monitor and measure my own life. There is a (pretty silly) name for this movement – the Quantified Self. One of the metrics I keep track of is the movies I watch, which won’t come as a surprise if you know how much of a cinephile I am.

When Letterboxd first launched in late 2012 I quickly realized that I could finally do away with my antiquated approach to logging movie watches and ratings. Letterboxd is the perfect social networking and movie review site, and I can’t recommend it enough.

I had first logged my film watching habits in a Google Spreadsheet, tracking numerous data points. I could use this at the end of each year to get some interesting information about my watching habits, favorite movies/directors, and total movies/hours watched. I tracked the following:

• Title
• My rating
• Director
• Release year
• If I had seen it before
• Genre
• Length
• Date of viewing

Letterboxd took all of these things, and more, and baked them into the most beautiful user interface. The addition of standard, modern social interactivity on their site makes it the ultimate cinephile’s tool. There is no better site out there for tracking your movie habits – I highly recommend it. I’m even a paid member – it’s worth it!