Like you I’m an avid self-experimenter, and I’m always on the lookout for things to change that will either a) improve me, or b) help me understand myself better so I can do a). I was comparing notes recently with Seth Roberts (his QS posts are here) about what experiments we’ve done, what processes we’ve…
I’m designing the data layer for my site, and it’s got me thinking about the essentials of what it is exactly that we track when self-experimenting. Putting on my ontologist‘s hat I’ve come up with two kinds of things that I think cover anything a human would want to track (I might as well be…
You probably made some resolutions for this new year. To help you meet your goals, give self-tracking a try. Self-tracking can help you view your progress, control your behavior, and understand problems that prevent you from reaching your goal.
A touchy-feely post this week, I’d love to hear your suggestions on meaningful things we might track during the holidays, now or whenever they are celebrated. Here are a few ideas I had in the social and health categories. What are yours? # social events participated in # laughs # times you stopped and took…
As I get to know the QS community and the wider life-as-experiment one, I’ve noticed something troubling. In some areas there seems to be more men participating in our work than women. In this post I’ll try to identify the problem, suggest a couple of causes, and then get your feedback on what you think…
While much of our work here is focused on individual development, there are plenty of circumstances in our professional lives where we can apply the ideas of experimentation. Let me set the stage with some background and ideas, and then I’d love to hear from you on how you widen self-tracking to apply to your…
I’ve been wondering if there is a small set of categories encompassing the ways we interact with the world to get useful data. Following are some that came to me, which I’d love your thoughts on. Note that all these offer creative opportunities for things to measure based on the consequences of the type of…
A reader over at my blog shared the NYT article Wandering Mind Is a Sign of Unhappiness, which reports on research by Killingsworth and Gilbert showing some surprises about distractedness. (My take: First, the least surprising result may be that the world’s happiest activity is reproduction. Second, almost half of the time we are not…
When was the last time you stepped back and gave yourself credit for your data-driven work? In our busy lives it is easy to forget to celebrate our accomplishments. It’s especially true when what we’re doing is heavy, like working with a medical ailment or a relationship problem. Fortunately, treating life as an experiment –…
Identifying patterns is crucial in experimentation because patterns can indicate useful correlations. After all, the whole point of experimenting on ourselves and collecting data is to find ways to make changes that help us to be happier, and patterns tell us where there are points of leverage. Patterns should make us curious, and we should…
A few months ago I was fatigued and decided to try a more rigorous sleep hygiene routine to see if it would help (it did). To make the experiment fun I thought I’d look for a nifty iPhone app to track the data. After a fairly extensive search I noticed that most of the tools…
In collecting data about ourselves we naturally encounter information that is unpleasant or unwelcome. This can range in scope from the prosaic (“I’m not losing weight fast enough”) to the the profound (“I just found out I have cancer.”) While this is a pervasive aspect of being human – resolving the conflict between What Is…
I am a strong supporter of self experimentation and citizen science, particularly when it comes to health (full disclosure: I’m CoFounder of CureTogether.com). Since our bodies all differ to varying degrees, we need to experiment with foods, lifestyles and medications to find out what will work best for each of us. And pooling our individual data…
Let’s admit it. People who do stuff are more interesting than those who don’t. Naturally we’re biased as Self-Quantifiers, but don’t you love running into folks at gatherings who have surprises and results to share about themselves, gained from experimentation and tasty data? It’s stimulating to hear about an insight (“I eat less when I’m…
Everything has a dark side (Photo by Pixelicus) Can self-tracking hurt you? We mostly talk about the positive aspects of self-tracking here, but it’s worth venturing over to the dark side now and then. Take this comment from Stefan on a recent discussion post: “After spending some time playing around with the idea of what…
Social media is an addictive time suck. We know that, but we still spend almost a quarter of our time on social networking sites. Can this be optimized? Can we get most of the benefits of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn without such a time cost? People have increasingly been asking me these questions, so I…
Thanks to a flurry of wonderful comments on last week’s discussion about what people are tracking, these discussion posts will become more regular. Feel free to also comment if you have an idea for future discussions! This week’s topic: How has data surprised you? Did you learn something new from self-tracking that you weren’t expecting? Did you…
Our last discussion post was so popular that we’re doing it again. Today’s topic is: What metrics are you currently tracking about yourself? What do you measure daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly? You get bonus points if you share what tools you use to track your data or any insights you’ve learned. I’ll start off…
I thought it might be fun to have some open discussions on the blog, where we all jump in to the comments section and share what we know. So why wait? Let’s get started with today’s discussion: What is your favorite self-experiment? It can be something you tried once, or a complex, multi-year effort. It…
For many of us, the answer seems obvious: why do something manually when you can automate it? But when it comes to personal data, automation involves a trade-off. As Project HealthDesign‘s principal investigator Anind K. Dey points out in this blog post, automation suffers from the drawback of “out of sight, out of mind.” (Dey…
