Collecting personal data for a decade

Anuprita Ranade
Nov 4 · 2 min read

When we were prompted to write this medium post, I thought about my own data collection habit which I have been following since I was 7 years old. At the age of 7, my parents gifted me a diary with stars and angels and glitter. From that point, I have (not quite regularly) maintained a journal. I write about particular days, things I love, events I enjoyed, my opinions about people and issues, etc. I’m 27 now and over this span of 20 years, I have logged data about various experiences.

My first journal

At a younger age, I used to write about my experiences at the playground or a fun trip to an amusement park and how much I enjoyed everywhere. As I grew into a teenager, I started writing about high school, college and everything I was learning from my life away from home. As I grew out of teenage, I started writing about social and political issues and my opinion about things happening around me.

When I read my journals, I see patterns that inform how I grew up from being a kid who found joy in candy to an adult with complex emotions. The journals give me a picture of the difficult times of my life and what I did to overcome the difficulties. They help me vividly recall incidents in my life. They are basically a documentation of how I grew up.

Going forward, for the next decade, I would like to continue logging my data in my journals exactly the way I have been doing since the past 20 years. This is a powerful tool because it helps me log complex things like emotions and experiences related to specific incidents/events in my life. This data cannot be easily quantified.

Apart from my journals, I would also continue logging my health data-my sleep patterns, menstrual cycles, exercise patterns and history of illness.

Anuprita Ranade

Written by

Product Designer | Graduate Student at Carnegie Mellon University

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