Comments on: Discuss: Why collect data about yourself?

By: Why People Collect Data | Quantified Self

Why People Collect Data | Quantified Self — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 07:42:57 +0000

[...] learned from it, or why they don’t collect any data at all. 23 people answered the call and shared their insights. There are many positive self-discovery comments like the stories we hear at QS Show&Tell [...]

By: Radio Head

Radio Head — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:19:24 +0000

Unfortunately, I’ve never attempted to collect data about myself, other than my elementary attempt of keeping a journal once when I was a kid, and it was ultimately derailed once my sister quoted me about it. But that is an interesting proposition, especially if they’re just vague representations just like the image above.

By: howard

howard — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:22:16 +0000

This is an awesome idea, I’d be interested in tracking proper psychometrics. Then you could correlate these with life events; a change in diet, excercise, job, relationship – may seem like pretty obvious correlations, i.e. I just got a great job now I’m happier than when I was destitute, but if you had more detailed indicators of outlook, values and mental states you might find some pretty interesting things (might be difficult it is to get objective measures – any suggestions of decent metrics?). Make your own income-contentment curves and sort out once and for all whether money buys your happiness!

By: Do you collect data about yourself? | Science Report | Biology News, Economics News, Computer Science News, Mathematics News, Physics News, Psychology News

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 07:29:54 +0000

[...] empowered patients trying to live a healthy life via data collection and analysis), and now over at FlowingData blog, there is a great discussion about collecting data about ourselves. Author, Nathan Yau shared [...]

By: Do you collect data about yourself? « ScienceRoll

Do you collect data about yourself? « ScienceRoll — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:36:22 +0000

By: Lanell

Lanell — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:31:29 +0000

I search the internet looking for references to myself. It sounds vain, but I have learned a great deal about where my online activity ends up, plus I am learning a lot about how internet applications use personal data.

By: Matthew Cornell

Matthew Cornell — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:06:23 +0000

[I don't think my first try went through.] That is the central question and the whole point – to gain insight, change behavior, and ultimately be happier. The “Tool Trap” (focusing on tools, rather than purpose) is tempting, esp. to us early-adopting self-tracking pron-loving geeks (myself included!)

I think what’s missing in the data-tracking movement is a cohesive philosophy of life that puts tracking in a larger perspective. In our Think, Try, Learn work, that philosophy is the scientific method, with the idea being treating everything in our lives as a kind of experiment. So rather than a data-driven life, I think we should be thinking of it as an *experiment*-driven one. That way people have a process and a goal, not just an activity. I tried to express this at http://www.matthewcornell.org/.....-life.html. Still working on it…

Re your questions: I’ve been tracking decisions I make and lessons I learn for about four years. I wrote about these: A Key To Continuous Learning: Keep A Decision Log (http://matthewcornell.org/blog.....-keep.html) and Some Thoughts From Tracking “lessons Learned” For A Year (http://matthewcornell.org/blog.....ssons.html).

I’ve started more vigorous tracking in our TTL tool, Edison, the experimenter’s journal. It’s our first attempt to support people thinking of life-as-experiment. It’s at http://edison.thinktrylearn.com/ if anyone wants to check it out. We don’t have a data layer yet – we have to use one of the many tracking tools available (hey – one user is using yfd – http://edison.thinktrylearn.co.....s/show/163), but I think there might be room for a tool that puts data tracking in the scientific perspective. The most common topics there are health-related, though we have productivity ones too. My focus is on health, along with developing my TTL work (writing the book and developing Edison), both of which are tasty meta-experiments.

Re: holding me back, I think tool usability is still being fleshed out. I recently reviewed all the iPhone apps I could find, but nothing has blown me away yet. (Unfortunately, the one that supports yfd – Your Flowing Data Uploader- only works on iOS 4.) Capturing data must be extremely fast, or compliance drops way off. Surprises: Well, for sleep there are so many variables that it’s hard to do good science. Another is I found that cutting out one of my mood disorder meds made resulted in no change – a big and welcome surprise.

Great questions!

By: Matthew Cornell

Matthew Cornell — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:05:24 +0000

Oops: I forgot to add I asked this a while back: Related: Attention Data Hounds: What Personal Data Are You Tracking? – http://matthewcornell.org/2009.....cking.html

By: Iris

Iris — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:48:02 +0000

I usually just collect data on my spending to make sure I’m sticking to budgets and meeting financial goals. But I was actually inspired by The Feltron Report recently. I’ve just started a month-long data collection of how I spend my time, how much I read, and what I eat. It would be fun to have the data (although a bitch to collect and log) to play with and use my analytical/data visualization skills, but I’m sure it’ll also lead to some interesting findings about myself and areas of success and improvement.

By: Roger Aleph

Roger Aleph — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:13:01 +0000

I have kept my personal expences for the last 5.5years and fund it very usefull to know how i spend my money. Info is very detail.