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Ask Slashdot: Do You Find Self Tracking Useful Like Stephen Wolfram Does?
New submitter Manzanita writes "The domain of personal analytics, or 'Quantified Self,' is rich with interesting things to measure and many hackers have started projects. But they will only take off if it is sufficiently easy to gather and use the data. Stephen Wolfram has collected and analyzed a lot of his personal data over the last 20 years, but that is far beyond what most of us have the time for. What do you find worth tracking? What is ripe for developing into a business?"
If the average person is sat down and told how much of their life is spent in front of the TV or playing video games, I would expect them to have a breakdown. It's one thing to know "I watch TV for 2 hours a day" but it's completely different when you're told "In the last year you spent 732 hours (yay leap year) watching TV." It's bad enough when MMO's and Steam made it possible to see your playtime. :)
Part of a healthy mind is the ability to forget unimportant or no longer relevant information in favor of more recent and accurate things. If i tracked myself I wouldn't be able to forget the unimportant or push aside the less desirable. I would be governed by old data and held to means and modes of things that may not reflect current realities.
This seems more like punishment than an aid.
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
Generally at the beginning, when one starts voluntarily aggregating it.
It's one thing to write a journal, it's another to maintain data when not required to. The stuff I keep organized are either all required (taxes and other mandated record keeping) or things that are part of collections that I don't want to buy in redundancy (movies, books, music), or things that need records to ensure reliability and functionality (auto and house maintenance).
Pictures we take are usually sorted just by date, and we occasionally browse through them, like a normal photo album. The only major exception to that is when we were house-hunting, and those pictures were functional records. Most of those house photos have been archived or deleted, unless we saw something cool that we'd want to do to our house.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Here's the deal -- it's interesting as a sample. You might extrapolate a lot from his data. For a better sample tools just aren't there, except are they? A smartphone knows everything about your habits. I have been tracking any walk, jog, cycle, hike, or paddle I take with an app on my smartphone for about two years. Guess what I found out? I don't care enough to do anything with the data. I'm fit, I'm healthy and happy, I'm not an obsessed athlete. I get the idea and the nerdgasm of data, but I it doesn't help me enjoy life more.