Micro-analysing ones life in this manner is wrong and counter productive on so many levels.
Knowing how many tracks you listen to a day is interesting trivia only.
Knowing how long you sleep for each night could be useful, but only if you have a problem with sleep and know, scientifically, what you're looking for. If you're consistently missing out on sleep and feeling ill as a result, you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this. And if you're not feeling unwell or having sleep problems, then you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this either.
Knowing the number of steps you take is also irrelevant unless it's part of some very slow burn exercise regime you're on, in which case you'd presumably count them anyway. If you're doing normal exercise, steps and heart-rate may be of interest, but only during the exercise period.
In short, knowing all of this info about yourself is not helpful. When it lacks greater context and, unless you know how to interpret it, is just a source of confusion and anxiety. At best, it's novel trivia.
A couple of years back I was working on a solution to track these kinds of things, and what you said is pretty much what I realized while at it. Tracking my sleep actually made me sleep worse because it placed more stress on sleeping. The less I think about it the better I sleep.
What I find more important is tracking what you did in terms of achieving the bigger goals you have. But tracking might not be important here if you have a good system that makes you do work on regular basis to achieve those goals.
I disagree - certainly about the steps. I use the Moves app on the iPhone, which tracks, without me having to think about it, how far I walk on a daily basis. I've found that it's motivated me to walk further than I used to.
I have a choice on a daily basis whether to walk to work, catch the bus all the way or do some combination of the two. It used to be easy to convince myself that I was walking further than I actually did (things like "I only caught the bus half way today, that's almost the same as walking the whole distance").
But when I've got an app tracking me every step of the way, that's not possible. I can get to Thursday, check my app and realise that I'm several miles short of where I should be, so if I'm going to hit my targets for the week I'd better get walking.
If anything, I'd love to be able to capture more stuff about my life automatically - it would be a lot harder to convince myself that the doughnut I've been given doesn't count because it was free (or whatever my latest lie to myself is) if I've got an app telling me otherwise.
Most people lie to themselves about things like the amount of exercise they do, the amount of junk food they eat and the amount of alcohol they drink. If they could have the truth presented to them as cold hard fact, that would probably be quite an eye opener.
The best use of this data isn't for finding problems, but for evaluating solutions:
- Do I sleep better if I don't listen to techno music before going to bed?
- Does not exercising late in the evening help?
- How about not drinking coffee in the afternoon?
- Lowering the room temperature?
Sometimes the effects are obvious, but often they are subtle, and it's easy to delude yourself (for a while at least) that a solution is helping when in fact it isn't.
Researchers do studies that show e.g. that drinking coffee in the afternoon has a significant effect on sleep (let's say it results in an average of 15 minutes less sleep, p < 0.05).
This is valuable information, but people are different, so the question is, to what extent does this apply to me?
Genetics might help predict this (rs762551 ?), but in practice I'll just need to test this for myself.
The notion that there aren't always one-size-fits-all solutions is well accepted (though often still not well implemented) in medicine (a.k.a. personalized medicine).
"That is researcher's job" - Appeal to authority fallacy. We all can collect stats, run experiments, and draw conclusions. Some of us will have a better grounding in theory than others, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't experiment anyways. It's like saying "nobody but professional chefs should cook"
"Need at least thousands ppl's stats to get a small conclusion". - Not necessarily. It depends on the design of your experiment, the distribution of the data under question, and the desired margin of error. (Amongst other things)
But even if you only roughly estimate those things, you can gain conclusions that are valuable to yourself.
To make up an overly simplistic example: I spend two weeks not drinking coffee, two weeks drinking coffee in the morning, and two weeks drinking coffee in the evening. If the amount and quality of my sleep do not change significantly between the three experiments, it's safe enough to assume that I can consume coffee without influencing my sleep.
It's not a sound experiment, because it doesn't control for any number of variables. It has a wide margin of error. I have not really looked at the sample distribution of sleep duration/quality. And yet, I can make the assumption that drinking coffee in the evening will not affect my sleep.
The point is, it doesn't matter if it's 100% correct. It's roughly correct, most of the time - which is good enough to plan your life around.
It's of course not good enough to make any statements about the general impact of coffee on sleep patterns. But that's not what self-measurement tries to achieve.
I agree completely. I believe that this information is useless trivial unless it's (a) embedded in context and (b) consumed experimentally.
By "embedded in context" I mean you need to not just know a larger constellation of interesting information (steps, tracks, mood, location, &c) but also have available information that connects the various data points meaningfully—"I'm blue so I listened to The Cure".
By "consumed experimentally" I mean that you have to have a lever or action which you want to use conditioned on the information gathered. Simply knowing is possibly boring or creepy, but being able to change your own behavior using that information is power. For instance, the opposite causal pathway as above: "I'm listening to The Cure, so now I'm feeling blue" implies a lever you could pull to feel happier. This drives you to want to experiment.
If you have both of those then you're driven to use data like this experimentally and that's pretty wonderful. To anyone who also agrees or is just interested in what you can do with data like this I suggest taking a look at Ian Eslick's "Personal Experiments" [0] which helps direct a user to collect data and invoke an N-of-1 experimental design atop the collection.
I can only agree that it is generally not very insightful — however, tracking might help some people focus and help them not necessarily understand, but realise, as in take a more emotionally loaded grasp, what is happening. In general, I would refrain from absolute when it comes to motivation science.
One practical application that I have found to Moves (one of the tools listed there, and the most used one) is journaling: not really detailing how much calories I have burned, bus simply where I was, and what I’ve done. The integration with FourSquare is great to help me remember “that great little restaurant I when to when I was in Barcelona… was that in June or April?”
In my experience — admittedly anecdotal and (I wish on everything that is precious) representative to no one — I torn my knee a year ago: ACL, the very bad kind. The pain… I spent a month in bed, convinced for the first two weeks I might not ever walk on my own (that wasn’t remotely possible, and sometimes making a jockish surgeon burst out laughing at your naïveté is all you need to feel oddly better). I still couldn't barely walk and had to: exercise, as soon and as hard as you can, is the only treatment. Moves really helped me track my every step there, and a dozen stepped counted at the time. I am emotionally quite fragile in general, more so then (because the accident had cost me a good client, delayed an interview with an amazing company, forced my long-distance girlfriend and I to cancel holidays together, ridden me to a windowless bed while Spring was finally out) and the pain… Without that bouncy blue dot proclaiming 360 steps was a ‘Personal record!’ I wouldn’t have gone through it nearly as well. Without the app to track on its own the time it took me to tumble on crutches to my very good, very busy and very time-conscious physical therapist (a block away, that is… 20 minutes the first days), I would have had no idea how to be there on time. Not representative, indeed. Bit not useless.
None of the tracking apps that I’ve used have had the expected impact: some revealed to me how my psyche was at stake more than training, some that GPS technology sucks, or that good design is still direly needed… None (with the notable exception of Moves) I’ve used durably, but all have had a positive, eye-opening experience on me. Often, help me realise what you describe quite well. But experiencing it still beats reading about it.
> In short, knowing all of this info about yourself is not helpful. When it lacks greater context and, unless you know how to interpret it, is just a source of confusion and anxiety. At best, it's novel trivia.
Isn't that the service that exist.io is hoping to provide? It seems to me like their mission is providing people with greater context than just a bunch of data points. They provide the expertise in interpreting this kind of data so that people don't need to analyze it themselves.
Now, I'm not convinced that they'll be able to provide actionable ways for people to improve their lives, but I certainly hope they can! We generate a lot of data w/out much effort; if we can also use it to improve our lives w/out much effort that's a big win from my perspective.
Isn't that part of the entrepreneurial spirit: having the courage to build something even though you don't yet have all the answers?
Agreed. The real value in this data is when it is grouped with 100s, 1000s or more people. One person's data is a statistical anomaly, group it in a significant sample size, then you get real insights. I agree with their page - selling data is gross, but that's where the value is.
> Knowing the number of steps you take is also irrelevant unless it's part of some very slow burn exercise regime you're on, in which case you'd presumably count them anyway. If you're doing normal exercise, steps and heart-rate may be of interest, but only during the exercise period.
Fitbit assigns me a goal of 10,000 steps per day. I can view the data and work to reach that goal. By being more active I burn more calories, allowing me to lose weight.
Gamification in service of nudging people towards healthier behaviors has value. It's a means to an end. Sometimes just having a concrete goal with a progress meter is all it takes to get a person to make a small but important change.
Knowing how many tracks you listen to a day is interesting trivia only.
Knowing how long you sleep for each night could be useful, but only if you have a problem with sleep and know, scientifically, what you're looking for. If you're consistently missing out on sleep and feeling ill as a result, you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this. And if you're not feeling unwell or having sleep problems, then you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this either.
Knowing the number of steps you take is also irrelevant unless it's part of some very slow burn exercise regime you're on, in which case you'd presumably count them anyway. If you're doing normal exercise, steps and heart-rate may be of interest, but only during the exercise period.
In short, knowing all of this info about yourself is not helpful. When it lacks greater context and, unless you know how to interpret it, is just a source of confusion and anxiety. At best, it's novel trivia.