Life, quantified

I just read this article about self-measurement. It's full of accounts of people who have undertaken self-measurement projects for various reasons, like trying to optimize their running performance, quit smoking, quit coffee, deal with sleep disorders, or improve productivity at work. I found the article quite thought-provoking in its own right, although all the descriptions of people hooking themselves up to sensors of various kinds made me think of this talk about how games will invade real live, as well as this TED Talk about harnessing the power of gamers, both of which I found quite interesting from the perspective of trying to shape the everyday behaviour of gamers (or would-be gamers... or maybe just anyone, really) by introducing into real life some of the same elements that drive them to happily spend hours training/leveling-up their characters, going after some kind of epic weapon or gear, or trying to beat a high score. I refer to gamers as if they're some kind of foreign group, but there's a very good reason I've deliberately avoided playing most video games for the last few years... in any case, my interest in the issue comes from a desire to more effectively shape my own behaviour.

I think I would do well to keep a detailed record of my activities, even just for some set period of time like a week or two. I can't even imagine how much time I don't realize I waste doing absolutely nothing of any productive value (entertainment/recreation counting as productive in some sense). I think seeing some hard numbers in front of me would shock some self-control into me. That's certainly the case when it comes to my spending habits, at least.

On a different note, the social aspects of self-measurement (when the collected information is broadcast) are also really interesting... In situations like trying to quit smoking, I could see how making your data available to friends might enable them to help keep you on track. But this part of the article gave me pause:

Jon Cousins is a 54-year-old software entrepreneur and former advertising executive who was given a diagnosis in 2007 of bipolar affective disorder. Cousins built a self-tracking system to help manage his feelings, which he called Moodscope; now used by about 1,000 others, Moodscope automatically sends e-mail with mood-tracking scores to a few select friends. “My life was changed radically,” Cousins told me recently in an e-mail message. “If I got the odd dip, my friends wanted to know why.” Sometimes, after he records a low score, a friend might simply e-mail: “?” Cousins replies, and that act alone makes him feel better.

As uncomfortable as I am with the idea of, say, Google Latitude, I think I'd really like to know when my friends are feeling down or especially happy, even if it isn't over something they'd consider worth going out of their way to talk to or tell someone about. At the same time, I'm not sure how I'd feel about sharing that kind of info if I were to track it myself... though I guess if the sharing bit were user-controlled, that would be less of an issue.