Waking up in 2020 with your quantified self
BEEP BEEP It’s 5 AM Monday morning. “If you wake up now, you will be happier today.” said a friendly but strict voice.
I get out of bed. “I ordered a standing desk from Amazon to see if this will make you more productive.” That voice again. I try to ask what a standing desk is but then I hear: “And I just prepared a mint tea so that you can reach your optimal performance today.” The year is 2020, and a piece of code just controlled my morning routine based on my personal data.
Do you really want to be told what to do the whole day? Will you trust software to order things from Amazon for you?
It is the beginning of 2016, I am working with a spreadsheet to analyze my personal data. I looked at all of the tools on the market and this is my “quantified self stack”:
- Rescuetime: to measure my productivity and how much time I spend on other activities.
- Sleep as Android: to measure my sleep quality and duration.
- Google Form: to measure my mood and journal about my day. IFTTT sends me two emails a day with a link to this Google form so I don’t have to think about this.
- Google Sheet: to analyze the data and create some graphs.
- Zapier: to collect all of my data in one Google Sheet.
At the moment I don’t use activity trackers because I just want to measure my productivity and sleep. More specific workout data or data about food don’t interest me as much, since I try to eat healthy anyway.
It is a lot of fun to analyze the data but still takes quite some effort to make sure that everything is tracked correctly and to analyze the data. The problem with a lot of solutions on the market is that the info that you get out of your data is not that interesting. It’s cool to know that you walked 200 steps but that is about it. The recommendations you get from applications are still quite basic.
Here is what would need to change before you could get more actionable recommendations:
- Make it easier to collect data: New sensors should make it easier to collect more data about yourself. There are still a lot of things that are hard to measure but could affect your day (for example: breathing, toilet usage, mood tracking etc).
- Experiments: The application should suggest improvements that you could make (for example try a standing desk, try a wake-up light) and measure what-if any- effects these have on your life. At the moment you would have to come up with these experiments yourself and it would be quite hard to track the results since you would have to test it for multiple weeks.
- Compare your data with other users: Life is quite complex. You could sleep more but eat junk food that day. This could make you believe that sleeping more is bad for your focus but it was the junk food that affected your performance. Therefore it is quite hard to come to clear conclusions. If you could compare your data with that of other people over a long time frame, it would be possible to remove parts of the noise in the data. As companies get more data, they will be able to improve their algorithms.
- Learn more about what is relevant for you: I only care about things that affect my productivity, so I don’t want to be bothered with other information.
It is clear that there are still a lot of ways in which these applications can be improved before they really add a lot of value to your life. It will be interesting to see if people want to be guided through their day or not. Do you really want to listen to a bot that orders you to go to bed? Will you trust software to buy things from Amazon for you? Let’s talk again in 2020.
Here are some applications that I keep an eye on:
