This past weekend, I drank four cups of coffee. I spent two-thirds of my waking hours at home; half of that time was with my wife. I met six new people. My most common meal was a sandwich—three out of six meals. On average, I rated my happiness level as a 6 out of 10, and my energy level averaged 4 out of 10. I also discovered a new tool for self-examination: an iPhone app called “Reporter.”

Reporter is an app to catalog your life: how you feel, how many coffees you’ve drunk, how you slept, who you are spending time with, and where you’ve been. The app alerts you randomly throughout the day to answer a short quiz, usually by means of yes/no or multiple choice questions, as well as pulling data from your iPhone’s sensors, in order to gather information about the decibel level around you, the temperature, and your location. You can customize the questions you are asked in the quiz; perhaps you want to ask yourself what you’re wearing or how many glasses of water you’ve drunk. Over time, the data collected can be pieced together to create a surprisingly complete and accurate picture of various quotidian aspects of your life.

The creator of this app, Nicholas Felton, is known for both for his creative graphic design skills and his obsessive compulsion to track everything he does in his life, all the time. Since 2005, Felton has created an annual graphic summary of the past year of his life, which he titles the “Feltron Annual Report.” The reports are beautiful, full of colorful statistics, charts and info-graphics describing the minutia of his everyday life.

Before creating Reporter, Felton created another web product several years ago called Daytum, which is a website with a simple but striking design, where you manually input data from your life to keep track of what you’re doing each day. It allows you to engage in a kind of micro-journaling, through a visual and (mostly) numeric representation of what you do each day, how you spend your time, and with whom. Daytum requires a diligence reserved for the truly self-absorbed: it relies on you to input data about yourself when you remember to do so, whereas Reporter unpredictably quizzes you throughout the day.

Nevertheless, you might wonder why anyone cares about keeping track of their mood throughout the day, or what they had for breakfast, or how much time they spend in the bathroom — and not just for a particular day, but every day over a week, or a month, or even a year. The idea of counting up the details of your life is both eccentric and reductionist—it’s reminiscent of the Rent anthem (526,600 minutes…) or Alfred J. Prufrock’s existential complaint about measuring his life in coffee spoons. (In particular, it seems that coffee drinkers come in for a surprising amount of sneering by cultural critics — to measure your life in cups of coffee—or coffee spoons, for that matter—is an especially banal form of self-reflection, so it seems). At the very least, the numbers and statistics of our lives would seem to trivialize our daily existence—even Harper’s Index includes figures that touch on weightier subjects than how many slices of pizza we consume each month.

But what the concept lacks in obvious appeal to the uninitiated, it makes up for in terms of its passionate adherents; known as the “Quantified Self” movement, there are thousands who are increasingly focused on measuring the how-much, where, when, and with-who of their lives, in hard data, tracked and aggregated into fancy charts and graphs. The growth of products like the Fitbit bracelet or the Withings scale is predicated on “quantified self-ers” who want to diligently keep track of their activities, and not just by remembering to write down how far they ran that morning, but to know how many steps it was, measured passively (or semi-passively) by their smart phones as they go about their days.

The appeal of these products is mysterious, but I find myself drawn to the idea. It seems to me that I sort of mindlessly wander through each day, without any sense of where my time goes, or with whom I’ve spent it. Keeping track of what I do, on such a micro-level, might be the first step in knowing who I am. It is the “self” not as an inner mental life, but as a series of actions, of choices about what I do when I step out into the world each day. Thankfully, Reporter will tell me, after a few weeks of quietly gathering data, what I actually do, which then leads to the next step: choosing what I want to do. Actively. Mindfully. Consciously. Rather than defining myself privately by the thoughts I think each moment (over which I often seem to have no control) I could know myself by what I do, and choose to do that which I want to be.

And so, I’ve downloaded the Reporter app and started adding entries. Ostensibly, the app should be checking in with me roughly 12 times per day (although it doesn’t seem to be buzzing me quite that often for some reason). When I have enough data, I’ll take it and put into graphical format, hopefully with a variety of colorful charts.

And, then, I will know who I am. After all, as the saying goes, the unexamined life isn’t worth living.