Why collect data about yourself? To be happy!

Nathan Yau (http://flowingdata.com/about-nathan/) asks an important question: Why do people collect data? However, there are plenty of others who collect data in an effort to change their behavior in some way. They might be trying to lose weight or stay more disciplined with their exercise regimen.

My thought is that this is the central question and the whole point to self-tracking - to gain insight, change behavior, and ultimately be happier. The "Tool Trap" (focusing on tools, rather than purpose) is tempting, esp. to us early-adopting self-tracking pron-loving geeks (myself included!)

I think what's missing in the data-tracking movement is a cohesive philosophy of life that puts tracking in a larger perspective. In our Think, Try, Learn work, that philosophy is the scientific method, with the idea being treating everything in our lives as a kind of experiment. So rather than a data-driven life, I think we should be thinking of it as an *experiment*-driven one. That way people have a process and a goal, not just an activity. I tried to express this at /2010/06/the-experiment-driven-life.html. Still working on it...

Re your questions: I've been tracking decisions I make and lessons I learn for about four years. I wrote about these: A Key To Continuous Learning: Keep A Decision Log (http://matthewcornell.org/blog/2007/04/key-to-continuous-learning-keep.html) and Some Thoughts From Tracking "lessons Learned" For A Year (http://matthewcornell.org/blog/2006/12/some-thoughts-from-tracking-lessons.html).

I've started more vigorous tracking in our TTL tool, Edison, the experimenter's journal. It's our first attempt to support people thinking of life-as-experiment. It's at http://edison.thinktrylearn.com/ if anyone wants to check it out. We don't have a data layer yet - we have to use one of the many tracking tools available (hey - one user is using yfd - http://edison.thinktrylearn.com/experiments/show/163), but I think there might be room for a tool that puts data tracking in the scientific perspective. The most common topics there are health-related, though we have productivity ones too. My focus is on health, along with developing my TTL work (writing the book and developing Edison), both of which are tasty meta-experiments.

Re: holding me back, I think tool usability is still being fleshed out. I recently reviewed all the iPhone apps I could find, but nothing has blown me away yet. (Unfortunately, the one that supports yfd - Your Flowing Data Uploader- only works on iOS 4.) Capturing data must be extremely fast, or compliance drops way off. Surprises: Well, for sleep there are so many variables that it's hard to do good science. Another is I found that cutting out one of my mood disorder meds made resulted in no change - a big and welcome surprise.

Related: Attention Data Hounds: What Personal Data Are You Tracking? - http://matthewcornell.org/2009/06/attention-data-hounds-what-personal-data-are-you-tracking.html

How Will You Measure Your Life?

In How Will You Measure Your Life?, HBS business professor Clayton M. Christensen talks about applying his models to personal development. He asks his students to find answers to having a happy career, happy relationships, and staying out of jail (apparently this is up there, given the financial chicanery). The idea of applying a model to living is exactly what Think, Try, Learn is about, though in our case the model is the scientific method, not business ones. What’s always attracted me to models is that they teach us a way of thinking, instead of what to think. The best self-help books do this, and I treasure them. They’re the keepers. I also like his section Allocate Your Resources: “Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.” My TTL take on this is Deciding What Matters, i.e., deciding what is worth your time. I think a great way to discover this is via experimentation. Try something small, evaluate its impact on your life, then decide whether to incorporate it more permanently. What other lessons from business can we take?

A big congratulations to Laura Stack on her new book "SuperCompetent"!

Laura Stack has just released her new book, SuperCompetent: The Six Keys to Perform at Your Productive Best, and I wanted to give her a big round of applause. I interviewed her a few years ago (see A Conversation With Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro), and she continues to impress. And as I continue writing my own book I feel deep admiration and respect for the process. Great work, Laura.

Here's a blurb from a recent webinar: Whether you're an employee, an entrepreneur, a team leader, or all of the above, SuperCompetent will give you proven methods to reach your and your team's maximum potential and achieve breakthrough results. You'll get to your productive best by mastering six keys to peak performance:

1. Activity: the value and importance you place on your work
   
2. Availability: your ability to master your schedule
   
3. Attention: the capacity to focus intently and concentrate on tasks
   
4. Accessibility: the ability to organize the inputs and outputs in your life
   
5. Accountability: the extent to which you take personal responsibility for your actions and outcomes
   
6. Attitude: your motivation, drive, and proactiveness
   

(P.S. An IdeaMatt bonus: She's listed me in the appendix as a top productivity blogger. Much obliged!)

An interview with Alexandra Carmichael, co-founder of CureTogether and Director of The Quantified Self

I am delighted to share an email interview with Alexandra Carmichael, a leader in the self-tracking data movement and the way health decisions are made using the power of the crowd. She is co-founder of the collaborative health research site CureTogether, director of The Quantified Self, and a Research Affiliate at Institute for the Future.

I came at the questions from our Think, Try, Learn perspective, with the goal of tapping Alexandra's extensive experience in helping people take control of their health. Her idea is that by tracking and comparing health data we can better understand our bodies and make more informed treatment decisions, with the additional benefit of contributing data to research [1]. This meshes nicely with our own ideas about how self-tracking fits into a scientifically-oriented life as experiment philosophy. (See my post The Experiment-Driven Life for more.)

Some additional links on Alexandra:

• Her QS articles
• Her @accarmichael Twitter account
• The CureTogether blog, The Collective Well
• Her Quantifying Myself article describing the many things she's tracked

Thanks Alexandra. Enjoy!

Why should people experiment with their health?

I try not to tell people what they should and shouldn't do, especially when it comes to health. But for me, doing careful self-tracking helped me solve a decade of chronic pain when doctors didn't know how to help me. So self-experimentation does have tremendous power. [The Wired article The Decision Tree: How Smarter Choices Lead to Better Health has more on her struggle with chronic pain. -- matt]

What mistakes do people make when experimenting?

The biggest thing I notice is that many people are not aware of the various cognitive biases humans have that affect our decisions and interpretations of the world. I wrote a bit about this here - Are You Biased? How To Make The Right Decisions

They also tend to try to measure too many variables at once (more on that below). [I think teasing out testable hypotheses and controlling variables in personal experiments is a significant challenge to personal experimentation. -- matt]

What are some ways that people trying personal experiments can keep it light and enjoy the process, especially given the serious nature of some conditions?

The most important point to remember is to keep things super simple. Only try one thing at a time, and see what happens. And only do things where you understand all the risks. Seth Roberts gave a great talk on this at a Quantified Self meetup last year: Seth Roberts on experiment design. [More on Seth Roberts below [2]. -- matt]

What are some techniques you've seen people use when they get data they don't like? Is there a healthy way to get some detachment from it?

Usually when people get data they don't like, it serves as a strong kick in the pants to change something in their lives. You can go about your life without thinking about your health very much, but when there's a number staring you in the face, it's hard to ignore. Sometimes this leads people to stop tracking because of the discomfort of the numbers. I'm not sure what a healthy attitude looks like yet, but I'd love to know. Great question!

What advice would you give to someone wanting to start trying things, but is afraid to experiment?

I'd encourage people to learn from others' experiences - check out the videos of people who are doing this: The Quantified Self videos on Vimeo. We will also soon have a self-tracking guide for beginners, on the new Quantified Self Ning site, to be announced on the QS blog. Stay tuned!

In what ways is treating things experimentally important in your own work and life?

In my work, we split test [3] everything - testing website design 1 vs. design 2, blog post title 1 vs. title 2, revenue model 1 vs. model 2. It's a very humbling experience as you realize that most of the things you try have very little or no effect. Personally, experimenting has eliminated my chronic pain as well as eased my neurological symptoms (What I Learned From Tourette's), and it's one of the key components we're teaching our kids as part of their homeschooling journey. [I completely agree on split testing. I'm often surprised by what actually matters, which hurts if I'm personally attached to a different outcome. -- matt]

What experiments are you doing right now, professionally? What about personally?

At CureTogether, we're doing an experiment in partnership with Emory University to see if recruiting patients for a survey online can beat in-clinic recruitment methods. Personally, right now I'm experimenting with eliminating all wheat and dairy from my diet, different dosages of Magnesium and Vitamin D supplements, methods and amount of meditation, ways to increase a feeling of connection to my life partner, and different thought patterns to improve my body image and ease my intensely negative self-talk. [I'm a big fan of vigorous well-being experiments like these, which we're finding are popular in our Edison experimenter's journal tool. -- matt]

As a co-founder of CureTogether and Redasoft, what is the role of experimentation when creating new companies, and how do you create a culture that supports it?

The work of Steve Blank and Eric Ries on customer development and Lean Startup has profoundly influenced our thinking in this space. Basically you learn as fast and cheaply as you can, which means getting something minimal out there, running lots of experiments and iterating quickly. Some great links for this are Steve's book The Four Steps to the Epiphany and Eric's recent conference Startup Lessons Learned. [Fast and cheap are important principles in any experiment in its early stages. The article How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows calls it "fail early, fail often." -- matt]

The role of the village "medicine person" has disappeared with the advent of medicine. Along with that is the trend to give up control of our health to people in authority. In what ways does CureTogether change that?

The top conditions at CureTogether are chronic ones - depression, migraine, insomnia, vulvodynia (female pain), where people have tried the traditional means of treating them and been disappointed. They are taking back control of their health because they have no other choice - we help them connect and share ideas with each other in a more structured way than was previously possible. We now have enough collective data to be able to release infographics showing the most effective patient-reported treatments for 7 different conditions. [These are utterly fascinating, such as whether Marijuana is better than chiropractic for back pain and the 9 Most Effective Anxiety Treatments. -- matt]

There's an assumption in the self-tracking movement of an "observation -> awareness -> change" cycle. What's your experience with that, i.e., does the simple act of measuring lead to change?

Ah yes, the eternal behavior change question. I'd say it's a matter of debate right now, with one side noticing that people have always had mirrors and scales and they're still obese, and the other side pointing out that you can't optimize something that you can't measure. Stanford researcher BJ Fogg studies behavior change, and has built a model for triggering desired behaviors - see BJ Fogg's Behavior Model and Fogg Behavior Grid. Among self-quantifiers, seeing the data and sharing the data (either publicly, like tweeting your weight via the Withings scale, or in person at a QS meetup) does seem to have an effect on changing people's behavior.

References

• [1] From the CureTogether about page.
• [2] Seth Roberts is a psychology professor and an expert on self-experimentation. He's the author of the controversial The Shangri-La Diet. I hope to interview him soon! Links:
  
  
  
  • His blog and self-experimentation resources.
  • The New York Times article, Does the Truth Lie Within?
  • Seth Roberts' fascinating self-experiments
  • http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2008/05/annals-of-selfexperiment-seth.php
  • MetaFilter's Self Experimentation is Credible Science??
  • Learning from self-experimentation
  • Marginal Revolution: Self-Experimentation
  • His Behavioral and Brain Sciences journal article, Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight
• [3] A starting point is A/B testing on Wikipedia.

Announcing Edison v1.2!

I'm happy to announce that we've added some tasty Edison improvements to make the site more engaging:

• Email notifications: You can now get emails when someone comments on your experiments. Just check "Receive an email if someone comments on my experiments" on your profile page. To subscribe to someone else's experiment, simply comment on it; you'll get emails of all subsequent comments. To unsubscribe, click "Unsubscribe me" under "EMAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS" on of the right of the experiment's detail page. You can also see how many people are subscribed.
• "See More" and "View all comments": On the All Experiments page, these two links expand individual comments or the entire conversation in-place without having to go to an experiment's detail page. You can still add your comment right there in the "Add a comment..." box, and clicking "See experiment" or the title still takes you to the details.
• "Share This": This new button at the top of experiment pages makes it easy to share interesting ones with others via email, Facebook, Twitter, and others.
• Smaller improvements: The "NEW" comment flag indicates recent experiment activity, and the font in Firefox+Mac has been increased just a bit.

Coming soon: You'll be able to log in using your Facebook account, rather than having to create an Edison-specific one.

I invite you to go to edison.thinktrylearn.com and browse others' experiments or start your own. Happy experimenting! -- Matt, Liza, Graham, and the entire Think, Try, Learn team