I LOVE personal data tracking.
I do it all. Fitbit for activity tracking, SleepBot for sleep tracking, MyFitnessPal for nutrition tracking, Financius for spending tracking. RescueTime for tracking all the time I spend looking at all these other trackers.
I avidly watch my Audible stats (and I wish Audible offered more). I spent way too much time going through my Spotify year in review. I would be delighted if every single app and service I use gave me these stats. I want to see, for example, my Facebook messenger stats: Who am I sending the most messages to? What time of day? How many messages per week? How many emojis am I using? I eat this stuff up.
If apps don’t do it for me, I do it myself. During my first semester of college, I created an Excel spreadsheet and every single day I put in a number, for each class, on a scale of 1–10, how stressed I felt about the work for each class. At the end of the semester, I graphed it all and looked for trends.
Why do I like the data tracking so much?
Because here’s the thing: I don’t use it the way a lot of people do, to track goals. I had a Fitbit for six months while at school and consistently got around 5K steps a day. My campus is small and I spent a lot of time sitting and doing work. I never really felt motivated by the Fitbit to actually do additional work to go out and achieve my step goal.
This summer, now that I walk over a mile each way to work every day, I regularly achieve the 10K step goal without deviating from the routine I would still do without the Fitbit. There are a few days where I end up just under the goal, and do make the effort to go out and make it, mostly for the sake of keeping my streak alive because I like to keep the graphs satisfying to look at:
Same with my financial tracker. I dutifully log every single purchase I make, recording the amount, the method of purchase, the category, and any other tags or relevant notes. At the end of the month, I can see a graph of where my money went.
Here’s the thing, though. I haven’t used this information to actually set a budget for myself. I don’t look at this and say to myself “maybe I should spend less money on entertainment.” I know that this month was unusual because I saw three Broadway musicals, and last month, the Entertainment category was only 11% and Food topped my list, so I’m not worried.
Backstory — I first downloaded this particular financial app when living abroad in Brazil and living paycheck-to-paycheck with no way to check my balance on the go. I was religious about updating this app because it meant the difference between a night out or a night in when it told me there were five days until my next paycheck and R$50 left in my account.
But now, even though I don’t have that situation with my US account, I still keep tracking my money because I’m just interested in seeing my stats.
That’s how all this personal data tracking feels to me. Other people seem to use it to set goals, measure progress, quantitatively know their status. Then there’s me. I’m just like “whoa cool this graph shows all my sleep habits for the past year, this is wild.”
What does it mean to be someone who aggressively tracks data without actually caring what the data tells me? Am I just incredibly self-obsessed? Or am I just a useless member of society who doesn’t set personal goals?
For all I know, I say that I don’t actually use the data results for anything but curious perusing, but maybe it has driven me to more steps, more sleep, less spending, etc subconsciously? But the upwards trend in my sleep graph, I believe, is just me having more opportunity to sleep in my schedule. I don’t need data to tell me to sleep more — I would willingly do that without any kind of prodding.
Sometimes I think about how my affinity for data tracking aligns with my values. As much as I would love to see my Facebook statistics, that means that Facebook would know all my statistics too. As someone who tries not to give away all my data online to be sold by corporations, that’s not thrilling to me.
On the other hand, I know that Facebook is already tracking all the data it knows about me. What I click on, how long I scroll for, whose posts I like the most. If they’re selling that data to advertisers, the least they could do is show me my statistics as well.
For what it’s worth, data tracking is really cool to see, and we have amazing technology that lets us track billions of things about our life, habits, and how we spend our time. This is a pretty recent thing too — ten years ago you didn’t have apps to tell you exactly what you do when. I’m excited to see where the future goes with data tracking and statistic accessibility and how our lives change because of it.
