Richard Sprague is interested in understanding peak performance. Inspired by self-experimenter, Seth Roberts, Richard decided to test if consuming fish oil affected his response time. In this talk, Richard explores his data and discusses what he found out when he ran his analysis.
Eric Jain stumbled upon a study published in 2013 that found the a full moon was associated with less sleep. Being an avid self-tracker and a toolmaker he decided to find out if that was true for him as well. Eric used his tool, Zenobase, to import, aggregate, filter, and then analyze his sleep data…
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….
Amelia Greenhall, of QS Seattle, describes five simple and powerful self-tracking experiments she has been doing over the past few years that feel like getting gold stars. For example, she records everything she has learned, done, read, or accomplished each month. Check out Amelia’s insightful lessons in the video below. Amelia Greenhall: Gold Star from…
Steven Jonas discovered through an EEG assessment that he had a strong “freeze” response to stressful situations. This inspired him to use his emWave to monitor his stress levels, hack it to alert him whenever he got too stressed, and change his patterns at work. Check out Steven’s open, inspiring story in the video below, filmed at Quantified…
Leigh Honeywell has always had trouble getting herself to go to bed, so she started tracking her sleep to make sure she was getting enough rest. In the video below, filmed at Quantified Self Seattle, Leigh talks about the different ways she measured sleep, how she caught up on her sleep debt, and what she…
Gustavo Glusman is a member of Leroy Hood’s group at the Institute for Systems Biology. At a recent Hood group retreat, the main topic of conversation was Quantified Self! In the video below, Gustavo gives a fascinating recap of the retreat, including how the researchers talked about QS, what experiments they did on themselves, and…
In this talk, Beau Gunderson shares a way to bring all of your disparate data sets, from Facebook to Twitter to Foursquare to Zeo to Fitbit to Runkeeper, together in one collection to be accessed through simple APIs. It’s part of an open source development effort called The Locker Project. The hope is to be able to…
Dr. Mark Drangsholt is a long-time self-tracker who also teaches evidence-based medicine at the University of Washington. He has tracked blood pressure and exercise, atrial fibrillation and what triggers it, deep sleep and sex, diet and body fat. In the video below, Mark shares what he learned about his arrhythmia triggers, and how his self-tracking data…
Robby MacDonell from RescueTime tried many different tools to form habits, and didn’t find that any of them worked. After a good deal of frustration, he started to investigate the idea of having goals at all. In this great talk, Robby honestly shows data that isn’t pretty – hooray! He also shares some really interesting insights…
Adam Loving wanted a very lightweight way to track what he did each day, without tweeting it to the world. He built a simple system where he can tell Siri what he did, and it gets recorded in a database. Some data gets automatically entered through if this then that. Adam found that it has…
Robby MacDonell doesn’t own a car, so he gets around on public transportation and on foot. He spent one month tracking his use of various modes of transportation, using the app MyTracks. In the video below, Robby talks about how he evaluated the different location-tracking tools, how he built his own custom interactive Google map, what…
Amelia Greenhall lost forty pounds with the simple feedback of checking her weight every day. In a bulimic college environment, she set herself some rules starting out: no dieting, and only long-term changes. She read The Hacker’s Diet, and was inspired to track the 10-day moving average of her weight for two years. Watch the…
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…
Buster Benson of Habit Labs likes to experiment with productivity, among other things. He uses RescueTime to see which apps and websites he spends the most time on each week. The winners are his text editor (for coding) and Gmail. In the video below, Buster talks about the ease of different kinds of tracking, from…
With 26 QS groups around the world now, chances are there’s a meetup somewhere near you. Here are some upcoming QS Show&Tells to check out: April 27 – QS Seattle #2 April 28 – QS London #4 April 28 – QS Vermont #1 May 16 – QS Amsterdam #3 May 28-29 – Global QS Conference…
Don’t be shy – come to a QS Show&Tell meetup! Say you’ve been reading this blog for a while. You’ve watched some self-tracking Show&Tell videos, read about some of the experiments people are doing, and now you’re thinking of coming out to a physical meetup. Great, this post is for you! Here is a schedule…
