Methods for Collecting and Analyzing Information About Oneself
I like documentation a lot. Here’s a look at a number of tools I use to collect info about what I’m up to, the methods I use to analyze it, and some stats from 2015.
Google location history
I love Google location history. I have an Android phone and I keep GPS on all the time, so when I go to this page on the Internet: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline, I see an amazing personalized log of everywhere I’ve been. This pattern was a favorite this year — covered a lot of ground going to a couple Youth-Led Tech locations and other favorite haunts:
Like most Google products, the more you teach it, the better it serves you. I have been adding custom places and correcting suggested locations. They don’t break it down by year, but they tell me I’ve been to 609 places, with hundreds more that are uncategorized. They completely redesigned the interface this year. It keeps getting better.
I consider Google location history to be the most sublime answer to one of the most important question anyone can ask: “where have you been?”
Foursquare/ Swarm calendar export
One of my favorite daily phrases is “my calendar is a series of suggestions”. I check in nearly everywhere I go, mainly so that I can periodically export my feed and import it into my Google calendar. That way I superimpose it onto my real calendar and it becomes a lens of truth onto the suggestions — the answer to the question “what did you do”. I checked in 700 times and was happy to see that I at least used my health club membership 24 times.
Illinois Tollway Transponder data
My children live in the western suburbs of Chicago, and I am often there. To make the tollways easier to use, I have a payment transponder affixed to the windshield of my car. Every time I go through a toll, a bell on the Internet rings and a row is added to a database. This makes me happy. I downloaded all that data and put it over here. I paid $317.63 over the course of the year in 436 tolls.
Ventra Transit History
The Ventra system allows you to download your last 100 transactions. There are lots of interesting items in there that buttress/ confirm/ illustrate things that I’ve seen in other places. Here’s a record of me going to and from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on the Damen bus:
This trip is also visible in the Google location history for that day, but there’s something cool about seeing the timestamps for entry and matching it, in my head, to the 8PM meeting start. These are behaviors I want to duplicate. Seeing them in these forms, for some reason, help me do that.
Fitbit
This little gadget helped me lose about 25 pounds a few years ago, and the more I use it, the better off I am. Since I invested so much in using it to count calories, it has been the easiest way for me to track my input and output. I just got back in the groove with Fitbit over the last few months, mainly because I had been dealing with some back trouble.
I have spondylolisthesis, which is a fancy word for my back is fractured and it hurts. It is a chronic condition and the pain had become really bad earlier this year — hard to stand, couldn’t bear walking much, stuff like that.
I devoted myself to figuring it out this year, and a combination of exercise, weight reduction, physical therapy (which was basically just advice on posture and stretching), pain consultation, MRIs, and cortizone shots finally did the trick. I really feel great.
Google spreadsheets
All of these data collection websites and apps have their own analytics, but none of them answer some of the questions I want to answer, because they don’t have the proper data to do so. For these questions, I created a custom Google spreadsheet and I populate it with info pulled from these tools. Questions like:
- How many days am I at my children’s house? 129 out of 365 days, 35% of the time. Keep in mind: they live an hour from me
- How many days were my wife and I out of town with the kids? (21) and how many days do the wake up and go to sleep in the city with us? (12)
- How many days did I spend out of town for work or board meetings? (45)
- How many times did my wife and I go out on a dates? (74)
Moar, always moar
There are other systems. Mymealtime has the answer to the question, “how many chicken patties did my eldest son consume in November 2015?”
Flickr has the answer to the question, “which of my images are the most popular”.
Control your data, control your world.