My daily sums (between 0 and 7) for my Happiness project dailies, as well as a 7-day trend line. Click for bigger image.
I recently ran into a coworker who keeps a blog with all of his data collected over a period of one year (Chris Volinsky and his “My Year of Data” blog). This is part of a larger movement of Quantified Self — which is about gaining self-knowledge by measuring various aspects of one’s life. I wanted to share my own data from a self-tracking project that I’ve been doing for the past 5 months (ever since my defense). I’ve been doing this kind of mindlessly for awhile so I’m using this blog entry as an opportunity to reflect.
I’ve been tracking myself as I do a variation of the Happiness Project, which is a book/blog that suggests for one to explicitly identify the aspects of life that are important to happiness and track them daily. After trying to do a few things each month, as suggested in the book, I switched to a more holistic approach. So, I track 7 daily items and 5 weekly items that I think are big components of being happy for me. Six of the 7 daily items (one removed for privacy) include: exercise, meditation, sleep, work, social relationships, and planning/reflecting on my day. The 5 weekly items are volunteering my time, exploring something new, reading for fun, dealing with a pesky task, and writing or drawing in this blog. I make all of this data for the past 5 months available as an Excel Data Spreadsheet.
Here are the few bits of insight that I got from this exercise:
- One of my goals was to prevent “screw it” days where something went wrong so I didn’t do anything. Well, that kind of worked, I had no days with the score of 0 and only four days with the score of 1.
- Even major life events such as turning in my final thesis, graduating, spending almost an entire month traveling for back-to-back job interviews, and moving from GA to NJ don’t slow me down as much as videogames. All the major dips were times when I started a new videogame. Is this enough to stop me? Not before Pokemon White 2!
- Tracking alone is not enough (my overall trend is currently negative). I need to actually set goals. Late-May, early-June, I was on the quest for the “perfect week” and it shows in the data. Later on I tracked, but just tried to “do my best” and that wasn’t as successful.
I really just plopped my data in Excel, which limited my insights, but here is what I would like to be able to do easily with this kind of data (*cough* make this for me, please *cough*):
- See how different tracked values interrelate and how each behavior affects the overall score. For example, is getting sleep very highly correlated with an overall high score? Or is it that if I sleep a lot, I don’t have time for anything else?
- Understanding why and where I struggle. What goals are most challenging? What days of the week are most challenging? Who are the people in my life who motivate me the most for each behavior (I don’t have contact tracked, but it would be doable to mine my calendar and phone to understand who I talked to that day)?
- Suggestions for achievable goals or games that I can do to keep myself motivated. For example, I had the idea of “perfect week,” but maybe there could be more focused games to keep things interesting. How about “healthy 10,” 10 days where I focus on sleep and exercise? Or “month of meditation,” where I try to do that every day for a month. Just something that will give me a bit of variety and something to focus on. Gamification really works for me, so I want something customizable where I can get help setting up goals and badges and such.
Is anybody else out there tracking something interesting? How are you analyzing this data to get insights?
Moving the discussion off Facebook:
Andrew Quitmeyer: July 4 was fun!
Lana Yarosh: Sure was! And also got a perfect 7 on the Happiness Project!
Craig Tashman: Very interesting post, Lana! I’ve anecdotally felt like a lot of what I might call my instantaneous happiness measure depends on the “first derivative” of my circumstances, rather than the circumstances themselves. It also seems to depend a lot on attention. Like, i can get bummed because I’m focusing on the bad part of an otherwise great day/week/life. Have you seen any of this in your much more systematic analysis?
Lana Yarosh: So, yeah, I didn’t actually talk about “happiness” per se in this post. I’m still trying to decide whether “when I do these 7 things, I am happy” or whether “when I’m happy, I do these 7 things” (direction of causation). I think I tend to look at the positive and say “I’ve done these 4 things” rather than “I’ve left these 3 things undone.” I’m also still struggling with this idea of how to keep a bad week from getting worse. That’s where I think good goal setting can help. For example, if my system knows that it’s 7pm and I haven’t gotten anything done yet, it might encourage me to go for a “last minute badge” by challenging me to get 5 of the 7 goals accomplished in the next 4 hours or something like that….
Craig Tashman: Interesting, though I wonder how much difference there is between causal directions (e.g., other research shows that smiling alone makes you happier). But your gamification approach sounds cool. Especially if you combine it with some AR, I could see some very interesting persuasive computing apps in that space!
Debbie Castro: this is really cool! And almost scary to try myself lol. Great work!
Eugene Medynskiy “I make all of this data for the past 5 months available as an *Excel Data Spreadsheet*.” I am crying inconsolably.
Lana Yarosh: I did use Salud for awhile, but no mobile way of entering data, so had to do something else. I actually just have it in Google docs, but I wanted to privatize it…
Lana Yarosh: Debbie, for me it was a good overall experience, because it got me to explicitly think about what is important. I had to suspend judgment and meet myself where I am instead of judging myself for not being better. Let me know if you do end up doing it and if you have any questions about how to make it work.
Laura White: Mm. Watching this and reading your previous blog post reminds me how torn I am on the quantified self movement, especially as a means to pursuing happiness. I like the idea of passively gathering all that data, but something about actively following the metrics is just problematic. In theory, I love considering everything (one of my favorite parts of my job is when I get to model dozens of variables and how they impact different scenario outcomes), but I also know that whenever I’m actively tracking more things in my own life than I can count on one hand, it’s usually a good indicator that I’m not in a very happy headspace. Not that that’s necessarily extrapolatable to the world at large, of course…
Lana Yarosh: I think intense tracking is one of those things that people start doing for a reason. Sometimes the reason is out there, other times it’s not really discussed (as in this talk). I only have two problems with Quantified Self. One is that it’s too focused on quantification — qualitative aspect are also interesting and trackable. In fact, people have been doing so forever, it’s called a diary. The Happiness Project talks about qualitative approaches as well (e.g., the one sentence diary). My second problem with Quantified Self is it’s focus on the “self.” Old wisdom tell us that the way to be happy is to think of oneself less and to think of others more. Obviously, you have to deal with pressing problems at home before the ones abroad, but there is some truth to the question about whether Neeley’s approach is just a form of narcissism. Other than those two things, I like Quantified Self 😉
Laura White: In many ways I really like it too! I just want someone to design a tool or system that makes my metrics disappear into the ether for weeks at a time until I have long term trend data. But I fully realize that’s orthogonal to the goals of, say, an M-Health startup. FitBit is the closest so far to what I’m shooting for, but even they want me to log in all the time to increase their community stickiness factor. (Also, I’ve killed two of their trackers in the wash in the past 3 years.)
Lana Yarosh: Well, there’s lot of different metrics that you can gather that are not on the body. For example, I use SLife to track all of my activity on my computer. You could also set up sensors in the environment if you’re curious about things like how often you cook vs. eat out, how well you sleep, etc. But, all of this data isn’t meaningful if you don’t take the time to reflect on it, set up goals, and experiment on yourself…
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