‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.’ – Ben Franklin

Self-tracking – or personal analytics as some call it – is a relatively new phenomenon brought about by the ubiquity of cheap sensor technology and the internet.  It’s a space that’s just now coming into its own thanks to the tech getting cheaper and lots of interested, data-driven geeks finding each other on the net and exchanging ideas.

The potential impact of self-tracking on personal health and overall well being could someday rival the discovery of penicillin – seriously – and we’re just at the beginning of what’s going to be a huge wave of self-improvement and individualized health care based on self-tracking and analysis.

I’ve recently entered the world of self-tracking… and there’s no going back.  My weight, body fat percentage, running speed and distance, calories burned, sleep patterns, investments, genetic predispositions, daily routines, mood, and even commute times are tracked and analyzed.  Sound a little excessive?  Maybe.  But only because it’s still not 100% automatic.  But it’s really, really close to being “set it and forget it”, and for me, the benefits far outweigh the few minutes I spend each day tracking things.

What is Self-Tracking?

The basic concept behind self-tracking is simple: our ability to determine cause and effect through our memory or experience alone is inherently faulty.  It’s tough enough for most of us to remember a birthday or anniversary.  Ask us to calculate how many calories we burned yesterday and how that affected our sleep last night and our blood pressure will rise – and we won’t even be able to detect that in order to prevent it from happening in the future! 

Our minds play games with us… they trick us into seeing and believing things that aren’t there in order to "protect us".  We can rationalize most anything we do or say (science shows this) which means deciding not to exercise because we’re busy or just don’t feel like it is easy to justify.  Of course, machines aren’t as easily tricked.

You can’t trick yourself when you have hard data.  You can’t convince yourself of something that the data doesn’t show.  Data tells you almost everything you need to know, whether you like it or not… and then implicitly asks, "what do we do about this now?" 

Data isn’t affected by human emotion.  It just is.  It’s difficult to look at data and "talk it down" like you can with your ego.  It’s ruthless.

You may have heard of the Hawthorne Effect.  The basic premise behind it is what makes self-tracking worth doing.  Basically your behavior can be improved or modified just in response to being studied, even if no other changes around you occur.  Does it matter if the person studying your behavior isn’t actually a person at all but a $50 sensor strapped to your shoe?  Not if you plan on leveraging the data.

We’ve all had that feeling of wanting to get credit for something.  If you’re tracking your morning run, and you know it’ll be posted online, do you think you’ll walk that last half-mile?  It’s amazingly powerful what a little pressure from data can do.

We also all have consistent patterns and routines each day.  These patterns (or habits) are a big determining factor in whether we’re happy or not, energetic or not, fit or not, or healthy or not.  But it’s hard for us to accurately determine exactly which of those patterns affect us the most in the most important ways.  Do you sleep better when you exercise in the morning or at night?  Does that better sleep affect your mood or your ability to focus on the computer screen at work?  Does that nagging back pain get better or worse when you take a hot bath or is light morning stretching the key? 

You’ll never know unless you pay closer attention.

So people are turning to self-tracking to help.  It’s a way to take all the data we generate everyday and start to draw correlation or causation between the events.  It’s not entirely dissimilar from how Microsoft, Google, or Amazon build software at the scale they do – lots of attention is paid to how people actually use stuff instead of how they say they do.  Data is king.

How to Get Started

Getting started with self-tracking is as easy as grabbing a pen and paper and making a small behavioral change to start tracking something (yes, the number of lattes you drink each week counts…)  The easiest thing to do of course is to get something that does the tracking for you.  If you can afford any of the tools below (like Nike+ or the Fitbit) you might want to consider picking one up and seeing how it helps… because honestly, most people don’t want to spend the time required to track things by hand.

1. Start with one thing you’d like to improve.  The best way to do this is to ask yourself that ultimate question: if I changed one single thing that would have the biggest impact on my quality of life, what would it be?  The things you consider will be entirely personal and unique to you, but there are also probably some commonalities with others.  For instance, when Gretchen Rubin started her Happiness Project last year, she knew that increasing her energy through exercise would pay dividends all year.  So she started there.  Some other ideas: lowering your blood pressure, losing five pounds, getting more sleep, meditating every day, spending less money on impulse buys, etc.

2. Commit to tracking it for thirty days at first.  Thirty days may not be long enough to drop 50 pounds, but it’s probably long enough to see if self-tracking is for you.  Don’t let yourself off the hook until the thirty days are up… by then, you may find it isn’t too hard to keep up after all. 

3. Spend some time each week looking at your data and drawing conclusions. Come up with your own theories about why things are happening.  There’s little point in self-tracking if you aren’t going to learn from the data!  If you’re someone who does a weekly review, that’s probably a good time to also look at the data you’ve collected and figure out what you’re going to tweak.

4. Test your new hypothesis.  Make a discovery about yourself based on the data at hand?  Think you know how to “fix” it?  Try making a small adjustment to your behavior and see what happens.  Do you focus better in meetings when you have green tea, espresso, or a Diet Coke?  You won’t know until you test it out.

5. Rinse and repeat.  Once you’ve maxed out on one area, take a look at tracking and analyzing another.  Could you improve another aspect of your life just by starting to track it?  Who knows?  Give it a shot.

Tools

As it stands, there isn’t a single, central repository out there for data gathering and analysis across all the various tools.  And there isn’t just one thing you can strap to your wrist to track everything from your cycling distance to your checking account. 

But there are a bunch of great tools available for specific things, or provided you’re OK doing a little bit of aggregation on your own.

Here are some of my favorite tools for self-tracking.  You can’t go wrong with any of these.

• Nike+.  If you’re a runner and you aren’t using Nike+ or a GPS unit like a Garmin Forerunner, you’re missing out!  It’s incredibly empowering to track your distance, speed/pace, and frequency over time.  Both tools also work with sites like Dailymile to help you challenge and motivate others as well.  I’ll likely do a follow-up post on both Nike+ and Dailymile at some point.
• Fitbit.  One of the cooler things to come out in a while, the Fitbit is a small sensor you attach to your clothing (or via arm band) to track your fitness and sleep.  Things like sleep patterns, steps taken, and calories burned can be huge motivators and important data points in an overall self-tracking program.  Just knowing how many steps you’ve taken (vs. what your goal is) can motivate you to ditch the elevator and take the stairs instead.  Remember: just knowing you’re tracking it and that you have have a goal actually matters.
• Withings scale.  A scale that sends your weight, body fat %, and body mass index wirelessly to a private web site.  An iPhone app that gives you a simple chart to see how far you’ve come.  All in all, the Withings scale is probably my favorite gadget this year.  It’s like peeking into the future.  Check out this mega review of it by DC Rainmaker.
• Joe’s Goals.  One of my favorite sites to track daily habits and something I use all the time to keep myself moving in the right direction.  We all like to get gold stars for getting stuff done – Joe’s Goals is just another way to do so.  I’ve written about Joe’s Goals before, check it out.
• 12 Goals: Excel Spreadsheet.  A basic spreadsheet containing everything you need to track your vision, goals, and your daily progress throughout the year.  A Refocuser exclusive!
• Track Your Happiness.org.  See “how your happiness varies depending on what you are doing, who you are with, where you are, what time of day it is, and a variety of other factors.”  Very easy to use!
• Mint.  The best way to analyze your finances across all your accounts and investments.  If you have more than $1 sitting in a bank account and you aren’t using Mint, you should give it a shot.
• Foursquare.  More social than analytical, it’s still a great way to track how often you’re visiting the same places and when.  The stats page is a lot of fun; for instance I know that Saturday is my busiest day of the week, that I’ve visited 46 different venues in the past few months, and that I drink a lot of coffee at the local café where I’m the unofficial “mayor”
• 23andMe.  Plan for your own health and wellness with the latest in genetic science.  Find out which diseases you may have increased risk for and what you can do about it.  You can also learn fun stuff like if you’re likely a fast caffeine metabolizer (I probably am, yay!) or have have bitter taste perception.

That’s just a short list to start, but they’re all things either I’ve personally used (in fact, all but Track Your Happiness I use all the time).  For a more complete list of tools, check out:

• Resources @ The Quantified Self

The Hardest Part

Believe it or not, the hardest thing when self-tracking isn’t the change you need to make to your daily routines in order to maintain it.  It’s actually learning something you may not want to know and not taking it too seriously.  You want to use the data to your advantage… not become a slave to it. 

Does knowing that your blood pressure is borderline high make your blood pressure worse?  Well, you’ll only know if you start tracking it, right?  And chances are if you do discover this, you’ll be motivated to fix the root cause.

The key with self-tracking is to work under the assumption that knowing is always better than not knowing.  If you don’t agree with this, you might want to think about why.  Is it out of fear?  Or is it because you know you’ll overly stress over what the data implies? 

Before you get started, make a promise to yourself that you will use the data to improve your well being – and that if you ever find yourself overanalyzing or stressing over the details, that you’ll back off.  Or at a minimum, you’ll work to get to the bottom of what’s driving your fear.

This process should be enlightening, but it should also be fun.  Don’t let it own you.

More Resources

• Wired Magazine: Know Thyself
• Wired Magazine: The Nike Experiment (about running and Nike+)
• New York Times: The Data-Driven Life
• The Happiness Project: Think About Your Routines
• The Quantified Self (blog)
• Total Recall (book)

If you liked this post, please share it with the ShareThis link below… or print it out and post it on the wall at Starbucks.  Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Guarantee Success By Tracking Your Habits with Joe’s Goals
2. 12 Goals: Tools You Can Use
3. 12 Goals: Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)

What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?

Capturing photos and videos and reliving those memories with family.  I love to catch my 2-year old daughter doing something fun and unique; something only she does. It gives me this overwhelming feeling that I’m witnessing one of the most special things in the universe – something that’s never happened before – and I can’t help but feel like I’m helping create the narrative of her life.  Almost like I’m building memories with her that will someday encompass her early life experience.  We’re helping build her past.

Last summer I made a short movie with photos from my daughter’s first two years as we were getting ready to release Movie Maker (what I work on all day).  It was one of the best things I’ve done for myself.  I was able to express my feelings more completely and creatively through pictures and short sentences, and it’s a gift I’ll give her someday when she’d old enough to understand it.  Every so often I go back and watch it, and I find myself filled with pride (and nostalgia) as soon as I hear the first bar of the song start to play. <By the way, I actually got the inspiration for my movie from Gretchen’s The Years Are Short>

I feel like this is one way I tap into that “past positive” aspect of time perspective, which is so critical to overall happiness.

What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?

When I was 18, I thought happiness was something I would have “someday” when things settle down.  Until then, I’m go-go-go because I felt I had so much to do before I could really consider myself happy.  But one day fairly recently (during the last couple years) I realized that “happily ever after” doesn’t exist at all.  There isn’t a time in the future when all will be right with the world, when everything will be exactly how I had imagined it being.  And if there is, that feeling won’t last forever… it may not even last a week.  The present moment, the here & now, is the only thing that actually is.  I realized I couldn’t wait until everything is perfect to be content with life.  My perspective shifted for the better once I internalized this.

Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?

All the time.  The first thing that jumps to mind is spending too much time in front of a screen of some sort instead of disconnecting.  I’m a total information junkie and bad habits stem from that.  I frequently find myself late at night clicking refresh on my email, my RSS feeds, and random websites over and over like a crazed junkie looking for a hit.  The payoff is never worth it, so I now forcefully shut the laptop lid and pry myself away (though it’s even harder with the buzzing phone in my pocket to fully disconnect… I’m working on it).

I also find myself questioning decisions I’ve made in the past, even when I know they turned out just fine.  Whether they’re career choices, financial decisions, or beating myself up for not making it to the gym during the week, I’ve since learned that I always need to move forward.  And maybe not take things quite as seriously as I had been.

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful?

I first saw this William James quote in The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

A few weeks later, I came across this quote in Rapt that I wrote about a few weeks ago: “Your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

Both sum up happiness for me.  You get to choose what you pay attention to every day, and those choices define your life more than anything else.  Focus!

If you’re feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost? Or, like a “comfort food,” do you have a comfort activity?

I have three:

Hugging my wife and daughter takes me into another place and reminds me instantly of what really matters.

Grabbing a short cappuccino and disappearing into a bookstore for a couple hours with a stack of books is something I love to do.  I’ve done this weekly for about nine years, and I always walk out refreshed and feeling more positive than when I walked in.  I also feel more creative as inevitably I learned something new and interesting that I can put to use.

And when all else fails, I go to the gym with my Zune HD and listen to sappy music while I lift weights.  It can be a struggle to get there when I’m not feeling up to it, but I always feel so much better afterwards.

Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?

The people I know who seem the happiest are those who are grateful for everything and find the positives in the things around them.  A good friend of mine, a working mother, when asked if she is disappointed by how much time she gets to spend with her boys responds, “No because I’m just so grateful for all the time we do get to spend together”.  That’s happiness.

Living in Seattle, where it’s beautiful most of the year with very mild weather, I constantly find people letting the weather affect their mood.  It could be a case of “misery loves company” – complaining about the weather is a great way to relate to others, I guess.  But so many people I know will complain endlessly (on Facebook!) about a rainy day, even after 20 straight days of seventy degree sunshine.  Not only is this detracting from their own happiness, but it’s bringing the people around them down too.  I don’t have much patience for people who complain all the time anyway.  To go back to the happiness mantra above – if you don’t like something, choose to change it!

Have you always felt about the same level of happiness, or have you been through a period when you felt exceptionally happy or unhappy – if so, why? If you were unhappy, how did you become happier?

Years ago I spent time self-employed because I thought I would be happier defining my own schedule, working from home on my own projects, and hanging out in coffee shops writing code.  But I quickly found that it was a pretty miserable experience (for me).  Happiness with my work involves working with a great team of people and feeding off other people’s energy.  I totally lacked this.  It also means big, scary, hard problems to solve, and I couldn’t always generate those on my own.  I found that I needed a mission shared with others to get the most out of my efforts, and the second I found that again, the emptiness went away.  (I also found that having steady income you can count on alleviates all sorts of stress!)

Do you work on being happier? If so, how?

I do, though I don’t know if I’d consider it work in the traditional sense.  I’ve always enjoyed learning about myself and get a lot of pleasure in trying new things.  It’s like a big experiment to see just how much I can improve my own life through various means.

I find reading to be a great way to learn.  Audiobooks too.  But as great as reading is, I find writing to be better.  You don’t really know how you feel about something until you’re forced to express it in words.  You don’t know how much you really know about something until you have to teach it.  I realized pretty early on that just having this blog available to me makes me happier, because I’m growing through my writing in ways that I couldn’t otherwise.

Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn’t – or vice versa?

I’m a borderline introvert.  I’m constantly scheming to get out of social events, professional and personal, so I can spend more time alone, with my family, or with close friends.  But I frequently lose that battle (being married has a lot to do with that).  Yet I’m almost always pleasantly surprised to find that I can have fun, sometimes lots of fun, with larger groups of people.  Even strangers.  Typing this right now I’m thinking “Ugh, I hope I don’t have to go through that again” – even when I know it’s been a blast before.  So this is something that I expect to find miserable, but instead find quite enjoyable most of the time.

Thanks for humoring me with my mock interview!

Related posts:

1. Making Your Choices in 2010