In case you haven't heard, there are some really geeky people scattered around the world who have founded a new version of self-involvement called QS:Quantified Self, subtitled "Self Knowledge Through Numbers". They meet at conferences, have plenty of web presence, wear gadgets like the FitBit, get their own blood tests and body scans, and are reading some very heavy, scary-sounding books.
So what? you say. I weigh myself, know my way to and from work even without GPS assistance, and can name a few food groups. What could these undoubtedly preoccupied techies have that I don't already have, or might actually need?
Well, they have an accumulation of data points about themselves, and you probably don't. If you'll give me a few minutes of your time, I'll take a shot at explaining why this could be a very good, even a transformative, thing - collecting data points, that is.
Data points are just individual bits of information, in this case, about you, like your weight, your height, your time walking a mile on a treadmill, the number of hours you sleep at night, how many Advil you take each day, how many times a month you go to a yoga class. A data point is anything that you can quantify.
Maybe you have kept a food log, matching calories in to weight lost or gained over time. You might have drawn marks on the doorway with a name and date to record your kid's growing up. In those limited instances you've been dabbling with QS.
But what if you went big in 2012 and made a commitment to keep track (quantify) half a dozen or more data points about yourself in an Excel file or on a piece of paper for the next 6 months or a year? It's just between you and the paper, no need to go public (unless you want to and there are websites where you can do just that). You pick the data, you pick the time intervals (although daily is the most interesting IMO).
Here's some possibilities:
1. Weight
2. Activity (steps walked, or just 1,2,3 for levels of activity, 3 being very active for you)
3. Allergy pills consumed
4. Hours of sleep
5. Pain pills consumed
6. Calories estimated
7. Carbohydrates estimated
8. Alcoholic drinks consumed
9. Respiratory infections/migraines/reflux - whatever your have that comes and goes
10. Mood (give it a number)
11. Hours in front of a computer screen
12. ???
After 3 months of collecting data points you might learn something interesting about yourself: You take less pain medication when you exercise more; you tend to push the activity a few days and then take a week off before you start to feel like a sloth, and then you overdo it; you eat a lot on weekends. Who knows what you will discover!
And that's the point of the data points. Discovering what the small things that make up your life mean, how they interact, how they might be influencing each other, how you could tweak your life and make it better just by becoming aware of something that's happening right under your nose.
And as techie as this all sounds, it has an interesting resonance with another kind of self improvement you might already be familiar with - being present, being in the now, being aware of everyday things, self care, self-regulation, to name a few buzzwords. Data point collecting fits very nicely with any and all the above.
For more, much much more:
Quantified Self
Cake Health Free Healthcare Expense Management
Fitocracy
Tech resources for health
Why people track themselves
Happy 2012 or whatever year it is where you live. Thank you for sharing your time and comments!
(Robin's chart, at the head of this article, which I included just to show you another chart, comes from a collection of QS devotees profiled by Canada's National Post)
