Ewart de Visser had a friend who “didn’t like the whole work thing” and started speculating on foreign currencies. When Ewart asked him how much he was losing in his first few months, his friend wasn’t sure, so they set up a spreadsheet to start tracking his trading performance. In the video below, Ewart describes…
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…
Alan Bachers is an expert in neurofeedback training, which he comfortingly describes as helping the brain learn how to calibrate itself. He suggests that this training accelerates the process of getting into meditative or other desirable mental states, and can possibly help a medicated brain learn to function without medication. In the video below, he…
QS founder Gary Wolf speaks at the Silicon Valley QS meetup group, giving a meta look at what Quantified Self is about, followed by a personal show&tell about his meditation data.
Thomas Pickard has had Restless Legs Syndrome for the past thirty years, but was only diagnosed ten years ago. Since his diagnosis, he has experimented with drug dosage, had his genome partially sequenced, and started a RLS/Niacin study on Genomera. In the video below, Thomas talks about what he learned about his sleep, blood and…
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…
Rob Portil is sixty-six years old and has been overweight twice in his life. He’s been using FitBit for the past four months, and has reached his target weight. In the video below, he describes how he experiences the daily tracking, how his sweetheart experiences it differently, which Four Hour Body workouts he does, and…
Corey Maass is a freelance web developer who has spent the last six years getting his personal finances under control. He read every book and blog he could find on how to keep his bank account above zero, and built The Birdy to help himself and others in the same situation. In the video below,…
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…
Thomas Chistiansen of Mymee spent three years using a QS approach to reduce his allergies. He recorded his symptoms, intake of food, water, and supplements, as well as sleep, urination, and elimination. Through his careful observations, Thomas has been able to get rid of the eczema on his hands and can now manage through allergy…
Nick Crocker‘s QS journey started with his dentist telling him, “Floss the teeth you want to keep!” Nick tells the story below of how he spent five years figuring out how to implement changes in his life, and how hard it was to add this habit to his routine. He also shares, Ignite-style, ten lessons…
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…
Dave Kil runs marathons. He has detailed records of all his workouts for the past year and a half. Recently, though, he started feeling that running was getting boring, and he wanted more variety in his workouts. So Dave helped create sensors that can monitor different activities passively, including cycling. He also added high-intensity training…
Tereza Nemessanyi started quantifying herself in a time of great loneliness, after both her parents had died and she was missing their advice. She asked her friends for advice, but she found it to be polite and not always honest. So she built an app, Honestly Now, to let people anonymously ask for and give…
Imagine a few dozen people walking, running, jumping, jiggling their legs up and down, and introducing themselves to each other while competing on two teams. This was the scene at a recent Silicon Valley QS meetup hosted by IDEO. In the video below, David Fetherstonhaugh explains the fun, called The Step Exchange Game. The game was designed…
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…
On September 11, Lindsay Meyer was hiking with a group of friends when she suddenly lost all hearing in one ear. In the video below, she compares her experience with the California medical system to her own independent investigation through Google searches and apps. Lindsay draws a startling conclusion about the relative time and cost…
Douglas Mason didn’t know who the Beatles were until he went to grad school. As a classically trained musician, he was blown away when he saw their unique chord choices. He started to investigate why the Beatles’ music sounded so good. Douglas created a shorthand musical notation to represent songs as strings and analyze things…
Catherine Hooper has been tracking how she spends every hour of every day for the past 3 years. Why? To make sure she is living by her priorities. She defines her priorities, turns them into actions, then schedules them. Each week, Catherine sits down with her calendar, looks at what she already has on her…
Self-described hacker Fenn Lipkowitz gives a rich update to his lifelogging activities in the video below. Fenn created a detailed diary with start and stop times as a simple text file, generating a color-coded chart of daily activities. During his experimentation, Fenn began to read about the Life Extension Foundation and visited a site known as Longecity, a community of…
