The Quantified What.
“Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. (…) These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut. That is, what some of us do. Others use data.”
from “The Data Driven Life” by Gary Wolf
The quote above is from an NYT article, that I first stumbled upon in April 2010. It was about a group of geeks tracking personal data in their everyday lives and how they used this data to draw useful conclusions from it.
I was instantly fascinated by the gigantic potential behind this idea and started experimenting to track little bits and pieces right away. Ever since then, the idea and the movement behind it have seen enormous waves of interest from the private as well as from the commercial side. What the article from 2010 described as a group of “geeks and outliers” with “abnormal behaviour” is now defining new industries, selling bestsellers and, as some say, moving us towards the the next step of human evolution.
However it still seems, that many people have never even heard about all of this concentrated awesomesauce- let alone thought about tracking a thing or two. As every dear reader of this blog is a very trend-aware, interested, cool human-being, this is of course intolerable.
To your rescue, the smart people from Third Wave have started what they call a “topic sprint” (a concentrated effort one just one topic) on exactly that topic. Their series should give you a proper understanding of what makes this topic so fascinating to me and why it might help you run that marathon or loose a kilo or two.
To give you an idea, here’s a paragraph from the first article:
“Data is at the core our lives in the information age. It’s one of the essential ingredients to how we work, make decisions, communicate and much more in the 21st century. Data is the most raw and abstract form of information, that has the power to change anything. From the decision of what to wear today by checking the weather forecast to buying or not buying stocks based on company metrics to whether to wage war or not according to data collected by an intelligence agency. (…continue reading)”
So far they have published three articles:
- Introduction: The Quantified Self by Johannes
- I track therefore I am by Johannes
- The Quanitified Self in health and lifestyle by Peter Bihr
My very own setup currently consists of 12 metrics, that I am trying and most often failing to track on regular basis. Despite all doubts at the beginning, some have already helped me to change some of my habits, others are still being tracked, because I suspect them to be motivating or offer genius future use cases. Most of all however I find it fascinating to able to observe and experiment that is still so dynamic and full of novelty.
As I like to say: What you learn in the process is just as important the outcome. Happy tracking!
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