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Get inspiration and ideas from hundreds of self-tracking projects documented in our community archive, searchable by tools and topics.
Our archive of hundreds of self-tracking projects.
Essays, links, and short posts from Quantified Self participants on the culture, tools, and methods of self-tracking.
Posts on self-tracking culture, tools, and methods.
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Roger Craig, a Jeopardy Tournament of Champions winner, goes over the concept of spaced repetition and how he used Anki to not only win a game show, but to memorize anything.
Alec Rogers wanted to see if there was a way to measure mindfulness after meditation, so he built his own simple, open-source meditation tracker.
Agnieszka has meditated with the Muse meditation headband for almost two years. By doing this, she hopes to improve her focus and concentration ability during the meditation session and afterward. In this video, she discusses what she did and shares her data from her meditation apps and the Muse meditation headband. She also shares what she learned from her experiment.
Shamay Agaron has been using a breath measurement instrument, the Spire, to understand more about his patterns of focus.
Steven Jonas has been using SuperMemo since he read Gary Wolf's article about the tool in 2010. In this talk, Steven introduces a new project he’s working on using SuperMemo–memorizing a daily log he keeps of interesting things that happened during the day. Watch his fascinating talk to hear how he’s attempting to recall every day of this life.
Elliott Hedman studied himself and others' physiological measurements during a classical concert. In addition to tracking himself and others with EDA sensors, he also videotaped the sensors. He learned that the transitions from loud to quiet or the reverse triggered everyone's sympathetic nervous systems activities. Interestingly, however, he learned how humans are receptive to familiar sounds, because when a xylophone was played, Hedman was the only one triggered because he used to play when he was a kid. In this talk, Elliot speaks to the benefits of both: being less quantitative and more qualitative with your data and less "self-centric" and more "community-centric" when analyzing.
Kyrill Potapov is a Phd candidate and teacher to 12 year olds. Kyrill used a tool called "Spritz" to help track his own reading and his students' reading speed and comprehension. He learned that using Spritz both he and his students had not only faster reading speeds, but also greater comprehension. In this talk, Kyrill shares how he did his experiment and the insight gained from this thoughtful project.
Steven knows that he needs to listen to an album a few times before he begins to like it. Despite knowing this, he found that he often chose not to listen to a new album because he knew it would be somewhat unpleasant. In this talk, he shows a system he created that schedules when he should listen to a particular album in the hopes that it would lead him to liking new music.
Gil Blander discusses InsideTracker's Innerage score and the effect nutrition and exercise have on physiomarkers, biomarkers, and performance. He shares the tracking of his weight, activity, heart rate variability, blood tests, and genetic data during the last year.
Richard Sprague worked with the late Seth Roberts on a brain reaction time testing application for the iPhone. Seth had a proven theory that certain foods and activities could help his brain be more or less reactive. Seth died suddenly last year, but Richard continued to work on the project and I came up with some interesting things that he shares in this talk -- including whether or not fish oil makes him smarter.
Steven Zhang shares his history of tracking and measuring concussions, headaches and sleep patterns along with an intervention he did to improve his sleep. After constantly suffering from headaches, he decided to take action and track them post a concussion the year prior. He used Taplog to collect his data to analyze if he was indeed improving.
JD Leadam presents his personal story of self-tracking that had transformative effects on his life by ultimately rewiring his brain. He shares his self-tracking obsession from analysis paralysis to eventual discovery of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)--an unprecedented tool which provided him with the ability to rewire his brain to lead a less-stressed life.
Justin Lawler has struggled remaining focused in school and in work throughout his life and so about a year and a half ago he went on a paleo diet and noticed some real improvements in focus. However, he noticed that he was still having some noticeable mood swings, so he decided to try Quantified Mind to start quantifying his cognitive function and short-term memory. In this talk, he shares his upward trending data and analysis over the past two and a half months.
Maggie Delano hit her head while helping a friend move. She was diagnosed with a concussion and, later, post-concussion syndrome last September. In order for her to heal, she had to give her brain a break from cognitively stimulating activities. In this talk, Maggie discusses how she tracked her progress toward recovery with Habit RPG (recently renamed Habitica) and improved her sleep with Sleepio.
In 2008, Steven Jonas read an article that pretty much changed his life. It was about about a program called Supermemo, written by Gary Wolf. Supermemo had this promise where it would help you remember 95% of what you’ve learned forever. Steven purchased the program and discovered it really worked. In this talk, he shares the lessons he learned from Supermemo.
One year ago Mark found himself in a mental fog, battling the "tip of my tongue" problem. Using his experience with single subject research design and self-tracking he tackled this tough issue head on. One of the benefits of long-term self-tracking is that one builds up a toolbox of investigatory methods that can be drawn upon when medical adversity hits.
Adam Laughlin has a background in psychology and software developments and has worked with various non-profits over the years. In this talk, he discusses the simple concept about measuring more than just happiness, a concept introduced to him by the founder of Next Stage Evolution.
James Norris is on a quest to experience life as much as possible. He has been tracking life events for 15 years. In this talk, presented at the Washington DC QS meetup group, James describes how he tracked many significant experiences and what he's learned from 1,500 of "firsts."
When memes, symbols, and ideas get transmitted to each other through gestures and rituals, they are in fact what makes up our life, perception, and thoughts. Robert began to wonder where did all the memes come from, and how did they get inside of him? In this talk, he shares his journey of his memetic diet; brain washing himself from these memes, and ideas.
Jakob Larsen and his team in the Mobile Informatics Lab at the Technical University of Denmark have developed a way to build a real-time 3-D model of your brain using a smartphone and the Emotiv EPOC game controller headset. In this ignite talk, Jakob describes his experience with a smartphone brain scanner, and how the fourteen sensors of his mobile EEG device rival a traditional lab EEG setup.
After receiving a link to a Wired article written by Gary Wolf and a software (in its 15th version) by Polish computer scientist and biologist named Piotr Wasniack, Steven bought the software and found out how it actually works. The program helps their user to develop some sort of super human memory. In this talk, Steven discusses the lessons from using SuperMemo, he describes using spaced practice to learn things and increase curiosity.
During the past year, Steven Jonas tried to memorize the daily stuff of his life. To do this, he used a tool that is called Supermemo. It’s a piece of software and it uses a technique that is called spaced repetition. Basically, it's an intelligent flashcard system, to help him remember the interesting things that happen to him during the day. In this talk, he shares how he thinks about memory and what is possible to remember about one's own life.
Ralph discusses how he used genomic and activity tracking data to get better results from his fitness training. Ralph used a 23andMe kit to find out his genetic profile. He researched those genes that have been found to have an impact on fitness to see his body should respond to exercise.
Can you use technology to be more mindful? Nancy acknowledges at the start of her talk that QS is often thought to be mainly about technology. In her talk, Nancy explains how she stumbled upon the idea of integrating mindfulness into her QS practice. When she took the time to look back at the tracking practice that was her most consistent – weight tracking – she noticed that her weight was just a proxy for her emotional state and corresponding life events. Inspired by a fascinating QS talk by George Lawton about observing his smiles, Nancy built her own smile detection and real-time feedback system.
Gordon Bell, legendary lifelogger at Microsoft and author of Total Recall, gave a candid, engaging talk on his MyLifeBits project. He showed pictures from his SenseCam that takes a picture every 20 seconds while he's wearing it. He generates 1 GB of data per month, including a screenshot of every website he visits and the hundreds of pages of health records from his multiple bypass surgeries. Gordon considers his data to be a surrogate memory - he doesn't look at it unless he needs to remember something specific, and he enjoys making films from the pictures.
As a long-time meditator, Peter Lewis had a suspicion that meditation could improve brain function, so he conducted a self-experiment and enlisted a few other individuals to help test his hypothesis. By using an arithmetic testing application, a timed meditation app, and an ABA research design he found out that there was some support for meditation improving his brain function. However, other participant’s results weren’t as supportive. Watch Peter’s talk, presented at the 2013 Quantified Self Europe Conference, to learn more about his process and hear what he learned by conducting this experiment.
In this talk, ultra-photologger, Cathal Gurrin moderates a QS Conversation about lifelogging. Using various wearable sensing devices to automatically record everything you see, hear, learn, and experience; creates a complete and accurate visual record of your life activities is a lifelog. Cathal talks about the the various interphases to digital memories that were used during the six years of vusual lifelogging.
Caspar Addyman is an experimental psychologist who is interested in what drugs and alcohol do to your brain. In this video, Caspar talks about the Boozerlyzer, which tracks what happens to your brain when you’re drinking. The Boozerlyzer is available in the Adroid store and Caspar explains how to use it.
Jeff Fajans discusses his yearlong tracking project, achieving the "good life" via positive psychology based QS. In his project, he specifically looks at character strengths and how they relate to one's vitality and vital engagement via two indicators of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing with the purpose of really learning what makes him thrive and how can he enhance his life. As a result of his project, he believes that by using positive psychology as a framework, we can learn to focus on our strengths and enhance the vitality and vital engagement of our lives and ultimately lead us to the "good life".
Ari Berwaldt has been suffering from consistent fatigue and mental fog, and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Then a few months ago he found the Quantified Mind website. In this video, Ari talks about using Zeo and Quantified Mind to measure effects of sleep on cognition, and shows fascinating data about lack of expected correlation. He also talks briefly about fasting and blood glucose experiment that shows poor accuracy of blood glucose monitors.
