A Quantified Self
It is an iron law of the Internet that, however hard you try, you always end up revealing more about yourself than you would ideally wish to. Writing a blog is probably the most rapid route to doing this, closely followed by twitter. So ... I have been tracking my diet and, sporadically, my exercise, using a well known cross-platform app, myfitnesspal (http://www.myfitnesspal.com/). This does not make me unusual, the service has significantly in excess of 30 million users. Using the very large crowd-sourced database of more than 500,000 items, I can record what I eat, and look at my consumption of fat, carbohydrates, sodium, sugar, and so on. I judge it has helped me adopt a healthier and more active lifestyle.
This is one simple and fairly obvious example of what is becoming known as the 'Quantified Self' movement. The idea is straightforward, in our professional lives we tend to use data to help us manage things. We gather data to give us insight and we set targets and monitor our progress against those targets. Careful quantification and systematic analysis of data are the basis of our professional practice, pretty much whatever we do. So it is strange that, when it comes to our own behaviour we tend to rely upon intuition and habit, perhaps we could use data to help us. This sounds, and is, pretty West Coast, but probably should not be dismissed on this basis alone. Rather nerdy, somewhat obsessive, guilty as charged.
We have a vast amount of personal data, that is increasingly accessible. Email and search statistics, computer usage, travel data, calendar information, financial information, security card access, shopping data, phone calls and texts, tracking and location, social media data, the list goes on. We also have a new generation of interesting personal devices sch as the Fitbit (http://www.fitbit.com), Jawbone Up (https://jawbone.com/up), Nike FuelBand (http://swoo.sh/Wk71Nq) which allow activity tracking. These are currently very simple: movement, sleep and exercise, but give much greater leverage when integrated with apps such as myfitnesspal and correlated with associated data. myfitnesspal reports that they are running at about 55 million API calls (data requests/supply) per month associated with linked devices, with a rough doubling month-on-month (http://slidesha.re/11aymBx). Sophisticated visualisations and dashboards render all of this data very powerful as a tool for understanding and changing personal behaviour. New health monitoring devices, for instance the Scanadu Scout (http://bit.ly/14QNFzn), that records various health related data (temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, ECG etc), extend the possibilities.
Beyond health and lifestyle, to work, the 'Quantified Self' remains a powerful idea. I have looked, for instance, at data on my email: when it is received, when I answered, how much I write and the length of time between 'spates' of activity; this has helped me to secure some very rudimentary control over it, or at any rate to give me a sense of why, and when, I fail to respond. I strongly suspect that if this were linked to information about my schedule, stress and other indications of effectiveness I could help improve my workload management.
So I say, "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better" and the data says, how much and in what ways. I strongly suspect that the 'Quantified Self' will become a major social movement, watch this space. @profserious has consumed 850mg of sodium and 21g of sugar today.