Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Does that count?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... I spend reading articles about tracking things that I track.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Check your premises.
There are lots of ways to go for my daily commute. Just because one is faster one day doesn't mean that it always will be.
Yes, I have kept logs for my travel times. I figure that saving a minute a day definitely adds up over the course of a couple of years.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
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. :)
Not generally driven by efficiency, but happiness.
I guess theoretically the data could be used to increase happiness, but I'd rather use my tried and true method of:
- doing things that I know make me happy
- investigating things I suspect will make me happy
- avoiding things which will not make me happy
- maintaining balance in the necessary evils and mitigating negative aspects (career properly balanced between enough money to be happy and job that while I don't dance out of bed in the morning, I generally enjoy).
That said, different things make people happy. Some people are efficiency junkies. Some people are financial junkies (everyone knows at least one obsessive day trader who doesn't make much money, and knows it, but still spends every free moment playing in the stock market).
.. and I guess I enjoy abruptly ending posts mid paragraph with no final conclusion!
I wouldn't sweat the whole ending posts mid paragraph thing. Sometimes I
Check your premises.
... indicate at what point collecting and analyzing personal data becomes indicative of a narcissistic personality disorder?
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.
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.
Fortunately, I have lots of time for this sort of thing.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
I find general health worth tracking. For a while, as part of my new year's resolution, I had a spreadsheet to track my body weight and blood pressure as well as to keep a log of everything I ate and drank and the amount I had exercised. I also had columns where I'd score my subjective well-being and stress levels, and one for general comments. Some interesting findings were that, unfortunately, exercise had a positive effect on my blood pressure. I also found that my stress levels strongly correlated with my alcohol intake the night before. Nothing like some first hand experience to learn something. Later on I found out that the hormone cortisol is responsible for those stress levels and yes, released when taking alcohol. I'd hardly call what I did solid science, but it is nice to find out when solid science confirms your own feeble efforts.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Burma Shave.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Modded
Sorry about that last one, folks. I'll try to do better next time.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's an exercise in gathering completely useless data.
How many people on Slashdot still have emails they sent in 1990? 1991? 1992? How many of those emails that you still have are actually relevant today? Worse still, how relevant to today is it to know how many emails you sent in 1990, 1991 or 1992?
Even more useless....number of keystrokes per day for the last 10 years.
This guy is going to die someday and his wife and kids are going to toss all this crap right into the dustbin.
Personal analytics like anything else can become an obsession. I think tracking your caloric intake, weight, blood pressure, exercise and money spending are worthwhile for health and financial well being (I've lost 40 lbs this way). Writing down the names of people you meet (if you're bad at remembering names) is good for social happiness. Writing down yearly goals is probably good for achieving your definition of success. If you care about it, you should probably track it.