The days I use my time wisely are the days when I feel most fuliflled and therefore happy. Ian Billett stumbled upon our Quantified Self website here and instantly became fascinated by our community of individuals who were learning about themselves through different technology. With his interest piqued, he began to investigate how he could…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Oct 11, 2014
Alex Tarling starting using the Mappiness app to track his happiness along with other contextual data. Over time the ritual of having to ask himself, “How happy am I?” three times a day started to get him thinking about how he thought about his own happiness and what that meant to him. In this talk,…
Today’s gallery image is from the co-organizer of the Chicago QS Meetup group, Mark Moschel. Mark has been experimenting with various methods of self-tracking and has even built a neat SMS-based tracking tool called Ask Me Every. You can read more about his tracking and work at the wonderful Experimentable blog. This visualization shows 3…
How can I lead a happier life? I’m sure this is something we’ve all asked ourselves. Maybe it was during a turn through doldrums or maybe you asked yourself how you could sustain your happiness during a moment of joy. Whatever the case happiness, and by extension mood tracking, has been at the forefront of engaging in…
In talking with many toolmakers, I find myself constantly surprised by how different people approach the same, and seemingly simple, issue with very different perspectives. A few months ago I wrote about Mood Panda which went from private to community. In contrast, Michael Forrest’s Happiness has evolved from shared to private. I also find Michael’s experimentation with the…
James Norris asks the Singapore QS audience, “Do you remember your first kiss?” In the 16 years since his first kiss at age 13, James calculated that he has had 1,500 “firsts.” For the past three years, he has been tracking his goals, according to how happy, fulfilled, and productive he feels every day. In…
About three years ago, Gary Wolf wrote a detailed post on Measuring Mood — some tools are complicated enough to get you grouchy! Gallup goes through a lot of trouble to gauge the US happiness level on a daily basis. Others take a simple approach, such as Eric Kennedy’s recent talk at the Seattle QS meetup on Tracking…
Erik Kennedy wanted to automate his happiness, so he started recording mood-changing events every day to find out what really made him happy or unhappy. After gathering 330 events, he categorized them and discovered that friendships and work were making him most frequently happy, while sickness and girl trouble were on the less happy side. Erik…
George Lawton studies happiness, and how to have more of it. In the video below, he talks about emotional feedback tools, his research on how to incrementally increase happiness, and how he tried to change his mood by changing his facial expressions. George also discusses mirror meditation as a way to increase emotional well-being, engages…
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…
A guest post by Matthew Cornell about his presentation given at The Boston Quantified Self Meetup Group #3 in Cambridge, MA based on his essay The Experiment-Driven Life.
Some things are easy to measure. Time, money, exercise, calories, location – all of these are relatively straightforward to repeatably determine or calculate. But how does one go about measuring happiness? What about compassion, or public influence, or creativity? These are more intangible, harder to pin down to a number that means anything. Douglas Hubbard has…
I’ve been meaning to write something about Track Your Happiness, a project of Matt Killingsworth at Harvard University. A couple of weeks ago Buster McLeod, an interesting self-tracker whose writing I enjoy, reviewed his experience with Track Your Happiness. He was pleased. Track Your Happiness Is Awesome Track Your Happiness is a project begun as…
