Monday 23 May 2011

Better Living Through Data

Like a lot of people, I've always been interested in self-improvement and being productive (however one decides to define what is productive and what isn't).  However, it wasn't until recently that I realized the potential for self-improvement through data mining.  We live in a time where there is already a ton of data out there about ourselves - data that, if logged and analyzed properly, has the potential to reveal useful things that we could practically apply to our lives.  This blog will contain my thoughts and investigations into these ideas.  In particular, I have a vision for a self-tracking tool that I hope to code and eventually publish for others to benefit from.  So between various ramblings about productivity, self-improvement, and personal metrics, I'll document its progress on this blog.  Hopefully this will add some extra accountability to this goal and give me that last bit of motivation to actually make it there, or failing that, at least share some ideas with some like-minded folks.

The idea of self-metrics has become fairly popular in the last few years, and doesn't take a lot of googling to find communities of other like-minded self-trackers. There are already a lot of tools out there to record and chart data about your health/habits/behaviour.  However, despite my efforts I haven't found an existing solution that covers absolutely everything I would want for such a tool (hence the need for my own).

But first, what am I talking about when I say self-metrics?  Most people already track some number of things about themselves.  Some people just haphazardly jump on the scale every couple weeks.  Weight would be one metric you can use to track health (one of many).  Other people might make an effort to remember how far they can run in a single workout, or how many pushups they are able to do, so that they can try to beat that each time.  These would be metrics for your fitness level.  Even just keeping a basic estimate in your head of your commute time to work (so that you know what time to wake up in the morning) is an example of a metric about your daily habits.  These are examples of what I would call manual metrics - that is, metrics that involve some conscious effort on your part to record the data.

Perhaps even more valuable are automated metrics - that is, metrics that you can record in the background of your day to day life without any real effort on your part.  Some examples of this kind would be the amount of minutes that you use on your cell phone per month (given by your cell phone bill), the amount of money you spend on beer per month (given by your bank statement), the amount of time you spend at work (given by your pay stub), or the amount of emails that you respond to in a given day (given by your email history).  The amount of data that we could track here is actually very large, and as technology progresses it is only going to get larger.  Smart-phones, in particular, contain a wealth of potential here.

We have to be careful, however, to be purposeful in our data tracking.  We don't want to track data purely for the sake of it.  For example, the number of individual grains of rice consumed per month, while vaguely interesting, is not going to be a very valuable piece of data.  Of course, there will be cases where we might not know how useful a given metric will be until we start tracking it, but we should try to keep a practical mindset here.  In particular, when it comes to manual metrics, we want to eliminate as much overhead as possible, because even the smallest amount of overhead would quickly overshadow whatever benefit the metric provides us (and therefore defeat the purpose).  For example, tracking exactly what activity you are doing at any given moment (whether it be cooking, cleaning, going to the bathroom, eating, etc.) would be useful, but the time required to record it would probably outweigh the benefits.

In the coming months, I'll make an effort to ramble some more and document my progress here (as much as is possible working a full-time job). Stay tuned!

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