Me logging my food at yet another anti-social restaurant visit. Photo: flickr.com/johnairaksinen

My three favorite uses of life logging

I just reached 2000 check-ins on Foursquare and it hit me: why do I keep on logging my life?

Two months ago I bought my fourth glorified pedometer (and my second Jawbone UP). With this purchase I spent more than $500 on different tools and services that will help me track and measure my life. When people find out about this they always ask me the same question: why? The short answer is that I am curious. I like to know what I’ve done and how it made me feel. I think it all comes down to health. I want to understand what affects my wellbeing (psychical and mental).

Here’s a more specific list of reasons why I track my life meticulously:

1. Self experiment: So curiosity is the main reason why I track. There’s no better way to satisfy your curiosity than a self experiment. A Self experiment is basically like any experiment. You have a question you want to answer, define a hypothesis and then conduct an experiment to see if your hypothesis were true. With the help of tools like Nike Fuelband, Rescue Time and Mappiness I’ve learned that physical activity is positively correlated to my activity on social media. I’ve also learned that spending time with friends and family make me more productive when it comes to work. Check out Quantified Self for more self experiments.
2. Photo album 2.0: They say data says more than a thousand pictures. All jokes a side, I strongly believe that data is the new photo album. Sure, there will always be Instagram and Flickr but to me it’s just as much fun to flip through my Foursquare data or my productivity score on Rescue Time. Memento is the best application for those seeking that photo album 2.0 experience. Thanks to my extensive life logging can go back in time, not just based on pictures and places, but based on mood, physical activity or productivity. Remember that day when you were in flow all day being all super productive? Where were you? Who were you with? Thanks to life logging I can easily look up the answer to those questions: the 26th of June, had breakfast at Nybrogatan 38, then worked from the office until 1:45 PM, had a quick coffee with Hundbilden and left the office at 8 PM.
3. Visualization: I’ve never been a big fan of art. Sure I like to stare at a beautiful piece of art as much as the next guy but that’s about as far as it goes. This was until I discovered art based on real data. For you Foursquare users out there I recommend this one. I’m aware that some people wouldn’t call this art but it is to me. To be able to be a part of great visualizations is one reason to track your life.

Quantified self and life logging might still sound a bit weird to you but I hope that you’ll find my three reasons so compelling that you might start tracking some aspect of your life.

Yes I’m from Sweden which means that what I lack in spelling I make up in efficiency. I tried to be thorough with the spelling but please look past my grammar.