2014: 1,005 articles read, 174 days of snuggling & 1 mountain climbed.
2014 Habits & Data — a year of my life and habits as told through data.
Since many of my days are driven by my desire for personal habits, I wanted to share a snapshot of my life through data. Most importantly, the formation of my daily habits, which resulted in 58% of my habits achieved in 2014 (roughly 1,200 out of 2,100). These 6 daily habits — reading, creativity, fitness, fruit, expressing gratitude and snuggling (thank you for this addition, girlfriend) — drove 5 primary categories of activity: intellectual progress, fitness & nutrition, travel, social activity and psychological & emotional well-being.
Since reading is of particular interest to me, I built a webapp that extracts all the articles I’ve read on instapaper and displays a ‘reading profile’ with stats and other features (screenshot below). I also want to give a nod to my favorite book I read this year, Capital in the 21st Century, as well as these sites: Medium, ZenHabits and BrainPickings.
I’m a big believer in your environment shaping your habits, which is why it was so easy to eat fruit 4–5 days per week (thanks for the supply Square!). Furthermore, because I walk to work and participate in fitness and outdoor activities, I average about 5.5 miles/day. Finally, I’d also like to give a nod to the seemingly small “35 days of outdoor activity” - I say seemingly because it consisted of climbing Mt. Shasta, hiking Big Sur, tanning on beaches, camping in Yosemite, and skiing Whistler.
Between work and personal travel, I was away from San Francisco 28% of the year, mostly still in California, but also in 14 other states, flying 86,000 miles (which is the equivalent of going around the world 3.5 times, or from SF to NYC 34 times).
While ‘social’ is largely offline, I did compile a few data points for the digitally social world, including work email (55/day), tweets (9/week) and instagram (1–2/week).
The final category, psychological and emotional well-being, is something I’ve put more focus into over the last 2 years, and while it’s nearly impossible to express this through data, I’ve compiled three quirky and representative examples.
You can see all my daily gratitudes here, but I’ve shown some below to help conceptualize the daily habit. The biggest success factor in writing down my daily thankfuls, along with all my other habits, was a mobile app called coach.me (formerly lift).
A big thank you to Coach.me (formerly Lift), Instapaper, DayOne, Square, my family and Erin for helping me form my life habits!
Data sources: Coach.me/Lift, Uber, Instapaper, Mint, Twitter, Instagram, Gmail, Tumblr, DayOne and my memory!
