Awais Hussain is a student at Harvard, and he found himself asking the age-old question, “Where does my time go?” Using his online calendar Awais started tracking his daily activities. This tracking has given him some interesting insights into how he really works and accomplishes tasks. Watch this great talk to hear more about what…
This guest post comes to us from QS Los Angeles member, Mark Krynsky. I went to the Los Angeles Quantified Self Meetup meeting on March 7th and had a fantastic time meeting like-minded people that are all willing to experiment and share their experiences. The meetup was held at the artisanal engineering studios of the…
Beau Gunderson lives inside his browser and struggles with distractions, so he wrote a Chrome extension to quantify his browser usage. He learned that he visits about 500 websites a day, sometimes has up to 100 tabs open, and occasionally declares “tab bankruptcy.” Check out Beau’s revealing story in the video below. (Filmed by the San Francisco…
(Co-written with Gary Wolf) In January we started asking ourselves, “How many people self-track?” It was an interesting question that stemmed from our discussion with Susannah Fox about the recent Pew report on Tracking for Health. Here’s a quick recap of the discussion so far. The astute Brian Dolan of MobiHealthNews suggested that the Pew…
Jae Osenbach LOVES chocolate. Unfortunately, her body does too. She decided to go on a calorie-restricted diet of 1200 calories a day for 6 weeks and track her weight loss. In the lively video below, Jae talks about her experiments with nuts vs. no nuts and chocolate vs. no chocolate, and her surprising T-test results….
In the QS world I’d like to live in, our personal data would be easily available to us to learn from using many different methods and tools. Here are some conditions I think would make this easier: Data can be exported from the various systems we use into a simple format for exploration. We can…
Only two months to go until the QS Europe 2013 Conference in Amsterdam! So we thought we’d release part of the program of awesome talks and sessions that will be given by QS community members. Check it out below, and please remember to register soon if you’d like to come – there are only 100 tickets left. Hope…
Here at QS Labs we’ve been curious about the differences between two of the most popular devices among self-trackers: The Nike+ FuelBand and the FitBit. I’m the latest experimenter on this topic, and since January I’ve been wearing a FuelBand on my left wrist and a FitBit (original model) in the right hand coin pocket…
We’ve posted some great talks by Amelia Greenhall here on the blog and we’re excited to bring you another insightful presentation. Last year Amelia gave a wonderful talk about her weight loss journey and the power of using running averages. In this updated talk Amelia gives a more in-depth look about how using a 10-day moving…
Ari Berwaldt wanted to better understand how his sleep affected his mental performance. In this great talk Ari explains his insights from tracking his cognitive skills using Quantified Mind and some surprising results about the lack of correlation between his Zeo data and his mental performance. Make sure to keep watching as Ari also explains…
Editors Note: The method outlined below no longer functions. We are keeping it up for archival purposes. (3/22/19) Editors Note: We’ve updated this post to reflect Google’s move to a new version of their spreadsheet application. The newest version no longer support the Script Gallery mentioned here. We have included a link in the instruction…
A month ago we showed you what we thought was the quintessential example of how Quantified Self is becoming more of a mainstream activity. During a trip to the Apple store we identified over 20 different Quantified Self devices. Another outing led me into one of the largest consumer electronics stores in the US: Best Buy. Here,…
This is a guest post from Chris Hall, organizer of QS Louisville. Thanks Chris!! — Coming off of a Sunday morning spread of our last QS Louisville event, in the Louisville Courier Journal, we threw another Quantified Self Meetup just last Wednesday. This time we were in the World Headquarters of the Beam Bluetooth Toothbrush. I roped Alex…
Welcome to the sixth and final part of the QS book on mood tracking that Robin Barooah and I wrote. This chapter has some thoughts on what the future of mood tracking might look like. Thanks for being on this journey with us! — At this point, you should have a good understanding of the nuances and…
The second QS European 2013 Conference is coming up. We run our QS global meetings as “carefully curated unconferences,” meaning that we make the program out of ideas and suggestions from the registrants, with a lot of thoughtful back-and-forth in advance. Today we’re highlighting Rain Ashford. Rain is currently a researcher in the Art and Computational Technology…
“I never thought I would be getting into this business.” This is the first sentence in a mind-expanding talk by Larry Smarr about his self-tracking journey. In 1999 Larry moved from Illinois to La Jolla, CA to take a position at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Like most Southern California transplants he quickly…
This is a guest post from Philip Goebel of Melbourne, Australia. Thanks Phil! — On January 30th, QS Melbourne held its first Show & Tell. It was on Melbourne University campus, with the space being organized by the university’s Interaction Design Lab and some light snacks and drinks for the audience provided by the Health and…
The second QS European 2013 Conference is coming up. We run our QS global meetings as “carefully curated unconferences,” meaning that we make the program out of ideas and suggestions from the registrants, with a lot of thoughtful back-and-forth in advance. We’re starting to get the point where we can give previews of the talks we’ll have…
Can you use technology to be more mindful? This question was at the core of a wonderful presentation by Nancy Dougherty at the second annual Quantified Self Conference: Nancy acknowledges at the start of her talk that QS is often thought to be mainly about technology. But not everybody sees it this way. Alex Carmichael,…
Welcome to part 5 of the QS book on mood tracking that Robin Barooah and I wrote. This chapter has some tips that we’ve found helpful for getting started with mood tracking. Enjoy! — Once you’ve been tracking mood for a while, and have a good baseline established, it’s time to play. What if you could influence…
