Discuss: The Quantified Worker

[cross-posted from Quantified Self]

While much of our work here is focused on individual development, there are plenty of circumstances in our professional lives where we can apply the ideas of experimentation. Let me set the stage with some background and ideas, and then I'd love to hear from you on how you widen self-tracking to apply to your occupation.

First, experimentation at work is not new. Frederick Taylor's Scientific management popularized applying metrics to factory worker performance in the late 1800s. Later came W. Edwards Deming, who influenced the Japanese Lean manufacturing movement in the 50s, which integrated experimentation, measurement, and continuous improvement. A more contemporary thinker is Thomas Davenport and his ideas on How to Design Smart Business Experiments (an excerpt of a paid article).

A natural starting application for self-experimentation at work is at the individual level, such as by trying out new tools or methods, either in self-management (e.g., productivity systems like Getting Things Done) or by exploring work-specific ideas and techniques. Here at the Quantified self we've had nice discussions on time management, including:

• Colin Schiller on Time Management Experiments,
• Peter Robinett on Predicting Productivity, and
• Bill Jarrold on Productivity Tracking.

Of course self-tracking tools abound, like the oft-mentioned RescueTime (see Kevin's "Productivity" Dashboard Monitor for a bit more). Putting the Hawthorne Effect and placebo effects aside, the value in all cases is getting insight into ways you could improve how you work and then implementing them. (You can find ideas for the latter in my post Add, subtract, multiply, divide: Productivity lessons from basic math.)

Beyond the personal level, experimenting at work is baked into some domains, such as industrial design (e.g., the work of IDEO's Tom Kelley), innovation (e.g., Google's approach), marketing (e.g., SEO or Test and learn), entrepreneurship (e.g., Lean Startup), and software development (e.g., Agile methodologies). I wonder what we could learn from studying them?

Given all that, I'm curious: How have you applied experimenting and data tracking to your job? How has it worked out? What tips can you offer for making experimentation effective?

"Love your experiments as you would an ugly child."

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

Bruce Mau Design's "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth"

2010-12-06: They did WHAT?

Quick links from the past week of experiments in the World Wide Lab

Weatherathome: how you can predict the effects of climate change on extreme weather events: a new international project called weatherathome, allowing anyone with a computer and internet access to take part and help understand how climate change may be producing damaging - or beneficial - weather events around the world.

The Washington Independent Will Close Down: The Washington Independent, an online journalism startup, finished its three-year experiment saying,

But TWI was not just a journalistic experiment; it was also a financial one, and ultimately, the successes of the former couldn't sustain the strains of the latter.

This is interesting from the Think, Try, Learn perspective because it goes to the balance between the generic (but profound) science idea of "We learned something" to the nitty-gritty "We failed to make enough money." In other words, what is the definition of success in an experiment? I'm still working on teasing out multiple dimensions, including learning vs. meeting goals.

Sidewalk experiments drive new ideas about urban public space: Small-scale urban experiments where people play with sidewalks using low-tech chalk, for example a tongue-in-cheek line dividing "tourists" and "New Yorkers." Urban planner Dan Burden says this is launching "a new science of creating walkways."

Tweeting students do better in school: This small study of 125 college students found that Twitter use inside and outside of the classroom "were found to score better grades than their non-tweeting peers." They found those students were also more engaged in the classroom. I wonder how they should factor in the risk of falling twitter black hole.

A truly priceless wedding: A young married couple used social tools to see if they could get people to give them stuff. I appreciate the frugal spirit behind small weddings. Mine (in 1986!) was tiny. TTL spin: I like that they came up with four ground rules for the experiment:

they have veto rights; they would encourage multiple offers; they can purchase elements they need, as long as they cost less than $10; and they want to keep it simple.

What are your ground rules?

Frankly, the future is all too predictable: Yet another study that might show that people have psychic ability. Check out Randi's $1M challenge - yet to be collected after many years. Not that this kind of thing isn't possible, it's just highly unlikely given how much time there's been to test it.

Hackers experiment with Xbox's Kinect: An example of a creative use of a new techology for new kinds of experiments. I love the idea of using things in unexpected ways - just watch kids, who can, for example, turn a stick into almost anything - sword, magic wand, baton, or horse.

Experiment Tests if Cargo Shippers Handle With Care: A clever experiment to test how carefully Fed-Ex, UPS, and the US Postal Service treated their packages. I've never had a single damaged shipment, but I don't send that much stuff.

Experiment Sparks Interest In Voter Fraud: A government teacher tested whether she could vote in person after having voted absentee. Result: They would have let her go right ahead. Not only was this a good reality check of the process, but she used it as a stimulating way to get kids interested in her topic.

On the Menu: Pastry expert Michel Richard says -- experiment! Another encouragement to play in the kitchen, but I'm still looking for the guidebook to experimental cookery. It would have to cover the role of accident and contamination, of course.

"To be respectable, it is necessary to spend your leisure time..."

To be respectable, it is necessary to spend your leisure time sampling the great masterworks of culture. To fight off the grubby materialism of American culture, it is necessary to be conversant in philosophy, theology and the great political events of the wider world.

Cultural changes allow magazine to experiment

Five ways to generate data

[cross-posted from Quantified Self]

I've been wondering if there is a small set of categories encompassing the ways we interact with the world to get useful data. Following are some that came to me, which I'd love your thoughts on. Note that all these offer creative opportunities for things to measure based on the consequences of the type of change.

• Removing something: In a culture that seeks and rewards constant stimulation, simplifying can seem alien. But widening the interstitial spaces in our lives makes room for something new to emerge. This general category of change might include removing a behavior (saying "Ah/Um" in public speaking), a food (cutting out ice cream), or an information stream (RSS feeds). Or it might mean opening up space in other ways, such as temporally (minimizing scheduled activities on weekends), spatially (reducing clutter), or socially (lengthening your pauses in conversations before replying).
• Adding something: The twin to taking something away is obvious, but there are plenty of novel applications. These include installing a new kind of thinking (e.g., CBT), extending your social circle (introduce yourself to one new person a day), or changing your surroundings (how about daily trips to a museum to surround yourself with inspirational art?)
• Making the invisible visible: As subset of adding, I'm intrigued by structuring our environments to make something that's intangible more noticeable. Applications of what's known as an Information Radiator in Agile software development, these kinds of changes can take many forms. You might make explicit your power consumption or pollution (how about adding sulfur or bright red coloring to car exhausts?) The idea is that these changes can be eye-openers that stimulate changing our behavior.
• Structuring the environment: Since environment structures behavior, it is natural to experiment with changing our surroundings and noticing the impact how how we act. Health possibilities abound, such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator, or parking far away and walking. A starting point is to decide what you want to change, and then figure how to set up the path of least (or most) resistance. (A few relevant asides: Check out How Smart Cafeterias Could Fight Childhood Obesity, Alex's How to Design for Behavior Change, and the classic experiment of fly images on urinals at Amsterdam airports - see Easy Does It - How to make lazy people do the right thing.)
• Simply measuring (Making no change): The final category is the null one - not making any change, just simply recording data. This is a good starting point when you have an intuition that there's something valuable to mine, but don't yet have a specific question you want answered. The potential value behind this is a fundamental principle of our work - what I call the "observation -> awareness -> change" cycle (a reverse observer effect?) The hope is that the resulting insights will inform the next step, perhaps trying one of the above.

What do you think? Do these cover your past or current data measurement activities? Can we use these to classify existing self-tracking efforts, or to come up with new ones? What other categories are there?