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Quantified Self Experiment

Benjamin Franklin

What is quantified self?

Quantified self is a discipline of self-tracking for the purpose of self-awareness and personal improvement. The Ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself” is one of the common ways to explain quantified self movement. People who are interested in self-knowledge through self-tracking usually want to change or improve something about themselves. One of the best ways to do this is to understand where you are now and where you want to be.

People have been tracking themselves for hundreds of years through journals, introspection, and observation. For example, Benjamin Franklin improved his character by reviewing his day to see if he has followed one of his 13 virtues, which he developed at age 20 and continued to practice in some form for the rest of his life. While Franklin did not live completely by his virtues, he believed the attempt made him a better man contributing greatly to his success and happiness (1).

Purpose – Why I am interested in tracking myself.

“Who we are is but a stepping stone to what we can become.” – Deus Ex (2)

I enjoy life and everything that it has to offer. I believe that one of the main drives in human beings is to strive for self-actualization or the motive to realize one’s full potential (3). I want to travel the world, connect with people, improve myself as a human being, and continue contributing to the evolution of our society even when I am 90 years old. This is why one of my goals is to live longer by taking care of my mental and physical health.

Joining the quantified self movement allows me to take better care of my well-being and help me achieve my goal of living a healthy, long, and meaningful life. Self-tracking allows me to see where I am now in relation to where I want to be in my life.

Intention – What I want to achieve by tracking myself.

Physical Health

Fitness is an important part of my life. There was a time when I used to go to the gym and take martial arts classes, today I keep things simple. I work out 3-4 time a week mostly using my own body weight, jog, and walk as often as I can. After doing my own research and trying different things, I came to a conclusion that to maintain a fit body I do not need a gym membership. What I need instead is a clear understanding of why fitness is important and how to use basic exercises to keep myself fit.  Nowadays, it usually takes me 25-40 minutes to complete my exercises without a whole gym “ritual”. Think of it as a minimalistic approach to fitness (4).

Another simple but very important part of my physical health is walking. It is hard to explain in just a few sentences how crucial walking is for our body and our brain, and yet very few people in America walk the recommended minimum every day.

Not only does exercise improve your physical healthy, but it also boosts your brain power. Our brains were built for walking 12 miles a day! If you want to improve your thinking skills, you need to move. Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting (5).

I recommend these resources to learn more about physical fitness:

Mental Health

My quantified mental health consists of working on my goals and tracking my reading. My goals are divided into five areas of my life: health, love & sex, work, finance, and relationships (see the well-being star above). Every week I spend some time analyzing where I am now and where I want to be. By focusing my attention on the most important parts of my life, I am able to track changes and make improvements. As for reading, I mostly read non-fiction books during the day and fiction before I go to sleep.

Spiritual Health

We live in a time of great innovation and technological achievements. It is also a time when many people are stressed and depressed because they are unable to adapt to changes around them. During the time of Jesus Christ an average person probably had to make 5-7 important decision during their lifetime. Today, people have to make 5-7 important decisions during the day. Facebook, Twitter, Email, TV, news, books, work, family problems, traffic, and many other things contribute to a stressful day.

Many people in America come home overwhelmed by all the information they have received during the day and stressed out by all the little problems they had to deal with. Most people take care of their stress by watching TV or eating food, both of which can make you feel good. However, stress management through TV and eating can lead to bigger mental and health problems. After all, being distracted from a problem is different from solving a problem.

The alternative is to use 20-30 minutes a day to meditate or use any other form of focused attention exercise that helps you relax. I practice The Key Method to help me relax, clear my mind, and find solutions to problem in my life. If you already have a method to help you relax then start using it, if not, then now is a good time to learn one, and start practicing.

Instruments – How I am tracking myself.

A growing number of cheap consumer gadgets are providing data for people interested in “quantified self”. In science, politics, medicine and many other spheres, data is collected to improve effectiveness and efficiency of something that works well or change something that does not work. Similar concepts can be applied to yourself.

I collect and use data to improve my self-awareness and make positive changes in my life. By collecting my own personal information I am able to better understand myself and make positive changes in my life.

Physical Health

I track my fitness activity using an iPhone App called Fleetly. “Fleetly is the best app to reach your fitness goals. Earn points for logging your workouts, connect with friends and join challenges at all levels, from beginner to pro.” I like Fleetly because it is simple, visual, and fun to use.

I also track my physical activity using FitBit Ultra, which shows me how much I have moved during the day and how well I sleep. Fitbit helps you make every step you take a step toward better fitness. The Fitbit Tracker shows your real-time activity stats so you know how close you are to your goals. It’s with you every step of the day, motivating you to make small changes that add up to big results. My personal goal is to make 10,000 steps a day. Fitbit syncs with RunKeeper, which then syncs back with Fleetly.

On occasion when I need to track my jogging, I use RunKeeper, which is a running app designed to track various cardio workouts..

Mental and Spiritual Health

I use Evernote to track my goals and to keep a journal. My journal is based on the simple technique called “The Three Blessings”. Each night before I go to sleep I:

  1. Think of three good things that happened today.
  2. Write them down.
  3. Reflect on why they happened.

This technique from positive psychology allows me to review my day and remember all the good things that happened during that day. I also try to understand why they happened. Not only do I reflect on how my day went, I also train my brain to focus on the positive aspects of my life.

I track how I feel, where I am and who I am with using an iPhone App called (GottaFeeling](http://gottafeeling.com). This app helps me analyze where I feel my best.

My relaxation/mediation sessions are tracked using an iPhone App called Equanimity. Equanimity has been carefully designed to help you establish and maintain a daily meditation practice.

I track my time spend on the computer using RescueTime, which is a personal-analytics service that shows you how you spend your time & provides tools to help you be more productive. At the end of week I am able to see if I have used my time productively or wasted it on something that was not important.

To track my read and want to read books I use Goodreads, which is  virtual bookshelves with online community.

Conclusion

Remember, it is not about how you track yourself and what you use to track yourself. It is about having a clear understanding of why you track yourself. Neither a cool gadget nor a well-designed iPhone app will be useful if you do not know why you want to quantify yourself. First establish a clear purpose for self tracking, then figure out how you are going to track yourself, and only then research what you can use to maximize your purpose.

I will experiment using all these tools to help me maximize my purpose. I will do this for several months and will write an update about my results. So far these tools work as a good reminder to keep moving towards my goals.

Quantified Self Resources:

References:

January 30, 2012 No Comments Short URL

Top Ten Tips For a Better Memory

Most world-class memory performers use mnemonics rather than have any extraordinary brain power. Neuroimaging studies of exceptional memorizers found no differences in brain anatomy between world-class memory performers and people with average memories (1).

This means that almost anyone could attain a “world-class memory” by practicing the right techniques, such as a mnemonic system (2). Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence that world-class memory masters are any better than the rest of us at memory challenges in the real world, such as remembering where we parked our car or when someone’s birthday is (1).

When you read, you will remember material better if you take the time to scan a chapter first, or get a sense of the major points before reading in detail. The more deeply you analyze information, the morel likely you are to encode the information in memory – and the more likely you are to remember it later. An overloaded working memory impairs (metacognition) our ability to accurately monitor and evaluate our own thinking (1).

Focusing on one task at a time greatly improves your ability to use your working memory effectively, which is your system that actively holds information in your mind to do verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension, and to make it available for further information processing (3).

In contrast, high levels of stress reduce the working-memory span and your ability to concentrate and focus executive control. Some research has suggested that stress elevates dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex, impairing its ability to efficiently monitor and update information. Why overload your working memory if you don’t need to? Maybe it is time to shut off that cell phone, put away the Ritalin (4), take a piece of paper (think of it as a third work-ing-memory buffer), and start writing things down.

1. Pay attention.

Often when we forget something, it’s not that we’ve lost the memory but that we didn’t learn the thing properly in the first place. If you pay full attention to what you are trying to learn, you’ll be more likely to remember it later. Stop multitasking and start paying attention to the information you are trying to learn.

2. Create associations.

Associate what you’re trying to learn with other information you already know. For example, if you are familiar with the basic mnemonic (2) technique consisting of letters and numbers, you can easily memorize your credit card and your bank account numbers.

  • 0 – S
  • 1 – T, D
  • 2 – N, M
  • 4 – R
  • 5 – L
  • 6 – Sh, Ch
  • 7 – K, G
  • 8 – F, V
  • 9 – P, B

Thus, you can convert 4527 into Roll and Neck where you can imagine a rolling neck.

Another example, while memorizing the periodic table for a chemistry class, it will be easier to remember that Ag = silver if you know that argentum is the Latin for silver. It might also help if you knew that Argentina got its name from early European explorers who thought the region was rich in silver (in fact, the native populations had imported their silver from elsewhere).

3. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Information such, as names and dates is more memorable if you can link it to an image. The effort you expend generating an image strengthens the memory. For example, in an art history course, you might have to remember that Manet specialized in painting figures and his contemporary, Monet, is famous for paintings of haystacks and water lilies. Picture the human figures lined up acrobat-style to form a letter “A” for Manet, and the water lilies arranged in a daisy chain to form the letter “0” for Monet.

4. Practice makes perfect.

There’s a reason kindergarteners drill on their ABCs and elementary school children drill all their multiplication tables. Memories for facts are strengthened by repetition. The same principle holds for memories for skills such as bike riding and juggling: they are improved by practice.

5. Use your ears.

Instead of just reading information silently, read it aloud. You will encode the information aurally as well as visually. You can also try writing it out; the act of writing activates sensory systems and also forces you to think about the words you’re copying.

6. Reduce overload.

If you’re having trouble remembering everything, use memory aids such as Evernote, Post-It notes, calendars, or electronic schedulers to remember dates and obligations, freeing you to focus on remembering items in situations where written aids won’t work say, during an exam!

7. Time-travel.

Remembering information for facts doesn’t depend on remembering the exact time and place where you acquired it. Nevertheless, if you can’t remember a fact, try to remember where you first heard it. If you can remember your high school history teacher lecturing on Napoleon, perhaps what she said about the causes of the Napoleonic Wars will also come to mind.

8. Get some sleep.

Two-thirds of Americans don’t get enough sleep and consequently are less able to concentrate during the day, which makes it harder for them to encode new memories and retrieve old ones. Sleep is also important for helping the brain organize and store memories.

The brain is in a constant state of tension between cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and cells and chemicals that try to keep you awake. The neurons of your brain show strong rhythmical activity when you’re asleep replaying what you learned that day.

Everyone needs a different number of hours of sleep and preference for when to go to sleep, but the biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal. Take a nap during the day that is no longer than 25 minutes. Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor performance (5).

9. Try a rhyme.

Do you have to remember long string of random information? Create a poem (or better yet, a song) that includes the information. Remember the old standard: “I before E: except after C: or sounded as ‘A: as in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh’”? This ditty uses rhythm and rhyme to make it easier to remember a rule of English spelling.

10. Relax.

Sometimes trying hard to remember is less effective than turning your attention to something else; often, the missing information will pop into your awareness later. If you are stumped by one question on a test skip the troublesome question and keep working; come back to it later, and perhaps the missing information won’t be so hard to retrieve.

There you have it, the top ten tips for better memory. There is nothing magical or extraordinary about having a great memory. Perhaps the best way to get a great memory is to use your brain more often. How can you do this? Read more books, solve more real life problems, relax, and remember to exercise.

Visual Summary

Bibliography

[1] Gluck, M. A., Mercado, E., & Myers, C. E. (2008). Learning and memory: from brain to behavior. New York: Worth Publishers.

January 24, 2012 No Comments Short URL