
Learning from 20 years of personal analytics - hendler
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/
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sr3d
As someone who's trying to optimize his life better, what strikes me the most
is this part of the post:

    
    
      For my consistent experience has been that the more 
      routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, 
      the more I am able to be energetic—and 
      spontaneous—about intellectual and other things.
    
    

This reminds of the book Uncertainty that I'm reading. Very interesting
indeed.

~~~
minikites
"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be
violent and original in your work."

Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Gertrude Tennant (December 25, 1876)

~~~
Drbble
This is a wonderful apologia for the needy/homely lifestyle... conserving
energy for something important.

And the flipside of course: pity on the extravagant, wild, dress up and party
lifestyle: a way to comfort yourself if you don't have anything deeply
rewarding to do.

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nod
The scope and scale of this data is breathtaking! However... it strikes me
that the best that he could do with this data was plot it and say "oh, I
remember those events". I wouldn't feel like all of that effort was worth it,
if I were him. What did it DO for him? Apparently very little.

~~~
mcav
Some people just _like_ data, the way others like walking on the beach or
playing football or reading a book. Some things just don't "do" a whole lot
for you except entertain or inform you.

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siavosh
This is amazing. I think the quantified self movement is going to be huge.
With more personal tracking gadgets (fitbit, jawbone, nike fuel), measurements
are going to become more and more seamless, passive, and complete. Not only
will you get historical insights into your blind habits, but you can finally
have an objective feedback loop on your behavior, and make necessary
adjustments.

But one of the biggest challenges is going to be privacy...

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dgallagher
Privacy will be one challenge, but I think seamlessness (as you mentioned) is
currently the bigger challenge.

I'm a runner, so diet is important. For 9 months I tracked everything I ate.
Weighed portions, counted calories, logged everything. The data was
insightful. I learned that I need to eat 3,300 calories a day to maintain my
weight, with a range of +/- 300 calories.

After 9 months I stopped tracking things because it became time-consuming.
Partly was because I learned what it "felt" like to be full, but mostly
because tracking it all was really annoying. If all of that could be automated
somehow, I'd love to have a spreadsheet of data which I could graph and chart.
"At 8:16am, you drank 7.8oz of Orange Juice, totalling 108 calories." Cool, my
O.J. container and glass measured that automatically, and uploaded it to my
database!

But right now doing it is extremely manual. All of Wolfram's amazing data
comes from some sort of automated system he setup once and never worried
about. A pedometer. A script chewing through 20 years of archived emails. That
form of automation doesn't exist for many types of data people would like to
collect, such as food intake, or blood sugar testing for diabetics.

Inventing these non-invasive automated sensors is key for society-wide
personal data collecting. Otherwise most data gathering will be sentenced to
the dedicated few, rather than the busy many.

~~~
freehunter
My grandparents are diabetic, and I've long imagined an implant that could
measure blood sugar levels and report it back when they sit down at the
computer or pick up a device. NFC is used in subdermal implants today, it
could be done. My grandfather has a pacemaker, perhaps it could be a combined
function. The problem would be getting blood samples without actually causing
damage to vessels, but I am no medical researcher so I don't know all the
hurdles.

I agree with you that measuring is the most intensive task of tracking
personal statistics. I can enter how many servings I had of what in any
fitness tracker website, but what if I had 1.3 servings? What if I had .2
servings (just a taste)? How do you estimate that without measuring it first?
And if you're measuring everything on a scale, where has the fun gone in life?
What's the difference between medium intensity running vs high or low? If I
biked at 15mph it might be medium, but what if I kept that 15mph steady up
steep hills? Or what if I kept 15mph down a hill without pedaling? We're built
for rough estimates and are amazingly adept at convincing ourselves we're
right.

I have enough difficulty with time tracking at work either breaking my
productivity or cutting into my limited "me" time, and that's just a petty
little thing. I usually end up estimating at the end of the week then fixing
discrepancies that always come up.

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kul
woah, "NFC is used in subdermal implants", is that already being done? I've
googled and seen it as something on the agenda, but have no idea if people are
already doing it?

~~~
freehunter
Well, if you define RFID as a near-field communication. This could be a matter
of debate, I guess. Obviously it's well-known for having your pets
"microchipped", but there's also this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_implant_(human)>

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pofla
If you're curious about the setup he uses there's more here.
<http://stephen.wolfram.usesthis.com/>

~~~
Drbble
I am looking forward to moving into a house so I can have that noisy hot
supercomputer in the basement on Gigabit Ethernet / wifi to the living room.

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Sukotto
If this sort of thing interests you, check out Kevin Kelly's Quantified Self
collaborative project.

<http://quantifiedself.com/>

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kayoone
wow, so he was and is writing a minimum of 50 up to 200 emails per day ?
Insane, that would take up my whole day, but since hes mostly managing his
company his job probably is mostly about writing stuff to people, but still
amazing to keep that up for so long.

~~~
azov
Wow! Just wow! So, he's reading about 500 emails per day, and writing over 100
emails per day, and spending about 10 hours per day on the phone, and has an
average of 10 meetings per day... those numbers just don't add up. The
meetings are obviously held over the phone, and he's apparently writing and
reading emails while being in those meetings, but I still don't understand it.
Are all his emails one-liners that don't require any thought or research? Is
he some sort of genius multi-tasker? How can it possibly work?!

~~~
cma
He says a lot of the emails were automated--system status emails during the
launch of alpha and so on.

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jedberg
Those are the inbound emails, not the outbound.

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citricsquid
For anyone that wants to track their own typing, check out the whatpulse
project: <http://whatpulse.org/>

My typing (<http://whatpulse.org/stats/users/210575/>) seems to match his in
frequency, around 10 million per year.

~~~
freehunter
My first thought on that is "people will just _install_ a keylogger?"

Then I read their privacy policy and it makes specific note of "we don't log
keys, just keystrokes". It must be the truth, they repeated that entire
paragraph twice in their privacy policy.

~~~
citricsquid
Haha, well they get that a lot. You can monitor network traffic if you like,
they don't track your individual in-order keys.

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10char
My side project <http://AskMeEvery.com> helps with personal data tracking. It
asks you a question of your choice (ie how many phone calls did I have, how
many commits, anything) every day and graphs your responses over time. Might
be useful if you're interested in this.

~~~
Drbble
Why would you ever ask a _human_ how many commits someone made? # of phone
calls I can almost understand, but we should be beyond that as well.

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commanderkeen08
When I was reading James W. Pennebaker's "The Secret Life of Pronouns," I
started consciously collecting as much personal data as I could for this exact
reason. I'm 23 and I've got most of everything I've ever done on a computer
since I was around 14 logged. I started thinking about the amazing insights
that all of this data can reveal to me in the future. Every IM conversation,
email, blog entry, text message, tweet everything I've liked on Facebook. I
can only imagine in 20 years, having a psychiatrist ask me what my childhood
was like and being able to show them a piechart of how many times I complained
about something to someone.

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peter_l_downs
I would love for all of the little tools and scripts he uses to keep track of
this data to be released publicly. Half out of curiosity (how exactly does he
do it?) and half out of interest in doing this myself. Although his post
doesn't seem to make any important conclusions from the data, I'm sure that
there are some really interesting correlations, patterns, etc.

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Drbble
> one can type and use a mouse just fine while walking on a treadmill, at
> least up to—for me—a speed of about 2.5 mph.

Anything you can do while typing and talking on the phone isn't much exercise.
This seems far more annoying and inefficient than simply taking a 10 minute
5-6mph jog on the treadmill around the block before lunch.

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mhansen
If this kind of thing interests you, I made an app that graphs last.fm song
listens in the same way as Wolfram's graphed his emails.

I find changes in listening habits correlate well with big life changes.

<http://markhansen.co.nz/scatter.fm>

~~~
tobbez
I see that you're making the API requests on the client side (a good idea
because of last.fm's API restrictions), but you should really consider caching
them server side.

It takes quite a while to fetch all plays if you have a lot, and currently, if
you want to share the graph with your friends, they would have to wait too.

~~~
mhansen
Yeah, I hear ya, it takes ages to load my data too. If there's a way to cache
on the serverside without running into the API throttling, I'd love to do some
caching.

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jpalley
If you are interested in seeing this sort of data for yourself - it is exactly
this experience we are building at BrainPage.

Leave your email on <http://signup.brainpage.com> \- we'd love your feedback
as it gets ready.

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ramblerman
This kind of data would be so cool for body related things

\- Calory intake per day

\- caffeine

\- minutes exercised

\- blood pressure

I could imagine in the future this would be quite feasible. The biggest
barrier probably isn't technological, rather the resistance to the idea of
injecting/carrying a little digital monitor

~~~
Gustomaximus
Many people, myself included, are keeping exercise data with sports-tracker /
Endomondo type apps. It quite nice to have this history.

And I'd love an app that collated calls, email, meeting data from varous
points over the longer term. I guess for most people this will be Facebook.

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sneak
All of this data is already going into our computers. I bet people would pay
for a slick app/service that visualizes it well, like RescueTime but more
holistic.

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wr1472
I wonder how he reliably recorded the phone call data?

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chewxy
The same way I do it - itemized phone bills :P

~~~
wr1472
Good point didn't occur to me!

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jl6
How do you scan 230,000 pages of paper?

~~~
Drbble
Auto-feed, like how a printer consumes paper.

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m_a_u_r_i_c_e
i can measure so i can mess with it. What did the person learned more then if
he would have asked collegues and his fam members. Humans are imho the more
important data filters and aggregators. I prob.missed the point.

