Hello Quantified Self World!
03 Sep 2015Flowing Data, a blog I wish I had followed sooner, featured an interesting graphic a few days ago. It was a visualization of a woman’s dating history for the past 8 years. Intrigued, I went to her website and discovered that she graduated from Northwestern the same year as me! She also had plenty of other cool data/vis projects, like keeping a tally of how many times she and her boyfriend each apologized as well as noting what the reasons were for doing so. Her page introduced me to the idea of the “Quantified Self”, meaning that the individual tracks various aspects of his/her life in order to live better. I followed a couple of QS blogs on feedly (another site I wish I discovered earlier) and have really enjoyed what I read - I am excited to begin tracking my life’s data!
This morning, I downloaded RescueTime, an application that runs in the background and records the amount of time a user spends on websites and other apps. All activity is divided into categories, and what I really like is the categories are already well-defined without me having to sort them myself. For example, there is a category titled software development, and I have labeled it as a “productive” activity; contributing to this category is the amount of time I’ve spend on RStudio, StackOverflow, and in my text editor. Similarly, RescueTime knows that recode.net belongs in the “News & Opinion” category, and wikiwand in “Reference & Learning”. I’ve had it running for about 4 hours so far on my laptop, and I’ve spent about half of my time on software dev. Another cool feature is that it syncs every minute or two, and doesn’t seem to have any noticeble effect on my laptop’s performance! Here is a screencap of my dashboard at the end of the day:
They also have an API and it seems like I’ll be able to query the data and do some interesting analysis once I collect more data! I hope RescueTime will help keep me accountable for staying productive for the majority of the day and help me find patterns (if any; I like to think I am unpredictable) in browsing behavior and productivity.
Another (iOS) app I downloaded this week related to QS is called Pomodoro, in reference to the well-known Pomodoro Technique. It’s free and the user interface is clean and beautiful. Basically, the Pomodoro Technique calls or 25 minute work / 5 minute break cycles. I find that it really helps me to complete short tasks (you know, the ones that should’ve only take about an hour or so but somehow took up the entire afternoon). I don’t use the timer consistently for every task, so I’m not sure how much value there is in analyzing the results, but perhaps I’ll think of something later on. In any case, it has worked super well in boosting my productivity and I will likely continue using this method for a very long time!
Anyhoo, I just wanted to share my discoveries and also publicly announce my commitment to the QS lifestyle. Now who wants to buy me a FitBit…?