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*Total Recall*
[since 2001] Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell...has been compulsively scanning, capturing, and logging each and every bit of personal data he generates in his daily life.
This trove includes Web sites he's visited (221,173), photos taken (56,282), emails sent and received (156,041), docs written and read (18,883), phone conversations had (2,000), photos snapped by the SenseCam hanging around his neck (66,000), songs listened to (7,139), and videos taken by him (2,164). To collect all this information, he uses a staggering assortment of hardware: desktop scanner, digicam, heart rate monitor, voice recorder, GPS logger, pedometer, smartphone, e-reader.
Here is more and that is all from the interesting new book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. You may recall that I mention Bell in Create Your Own Economy. I don't personally have the ability to operate all that technology. So if I could measure only five things from my daily life, what should they be? What would yours be and why?
Lately I've developed a new theory as to when I sleep especially well (in general I sleep well so the variance is not so large). I believe that I sleep especially well when I end up going to bed at exactly the same time I expect to be going to bed. On the unusual occasions when I don't sleep well, it is because I have been winding down my body and mind before I actually have the opportunity to fall asleep. Somehow when the later chance to sleep comes, it is too late for that sleep to be deep. Or so it seems to my mental econometrics; it would be interesting to measure it.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 22, 2009 at 11:18 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
This may partly explain why Windows is such a piece of crap. Developed by genuine nuts.
Posted by: Pavel Kohout at Sep 22, 2009 11:27:23 AM
i would track only heart rate. nothing else. a simple but continuous measure that could provide helpful insights on my habits as they relate to health.
all the other stuff seems a waste of time. so does he digitally record all the hours of time he spends reviewing his digitally recorded self from the day before? and does that make for the most boring feedback loop of all time?
Posted by: nate at Sep 22, 2009 11:40:49 AM
i would measure vagal tone
Posted by: babar at Sep 22, 2009 11:58:57 AM
How well does this illustrate the sensory deprivation that ensues in the digital age? Visual and auditory stimuli get all the attention to the detriment of our olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses. How "sensible" is this?
Posted by: Edward Burke at Sep 22, 2009 12:03:09 PM
Time spent in meetings.
Posted by: Michael B. at Sep 22, 2009 12:10:16 PM
i'd like to record myself sleeping and watch the recording while i'm awake.
i'd like to record myself while awake and watch the recording while i'm asleep.
Posted by: babar at Sep 22, 2009 12:17:21 PM
I find that I tend to sleep very well when I get more sleep than the night before. 6 hours of sleep after getting 8 hours the last 3 nights = misery. 6 hours of sleep after getting 4 hours the last 3 nights - energy and happiness.
Posted by: sd at Sep 22, 2009 12:38:09 PM
There's lots of work that's been done on optimal times for going to sleep and waking.
Sync is a very interesting book for lots of reasons.
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Sep 22, 2009 12:49:51 PM
I have listened to 30,000-odd songs since January 4, 2007, courtesy of last.fm's "scrobbling." It's an interesting way to track my listening habits. Never thought to track e-mails or documents or web page visits, tho. I wonder if he has metadata that tracks his tracking.
Posted by: Josh at Sep 22, 2009 1:30:00 PM
There was a guy on my paper route when I was a kid who kept a running total of every bite that he took. He was the best tipper on my route (back in the day, we had to collect door to door every month). I don't, however, recommend that you put bite counting into your top 5.
Posted by: liberalarts at Sep 22, 2009 2:00:36 PM
I remember hearing about Bell in Create Your Own Economy and what struck me then, as now, is how he doesn't have to do this anymore. For the last few years the expansion of data gathering across media and information systems has made this kind of manual effort redundant.
Given a few hundred dollars for the fees and a week's effort by a few grad students and I could reconstruct a 24 hour period for any one of you reading this (assuming you weren't stranded on a desert island). The very act of you reading this page is traceable. Some of you may think that's Orwellian and others may not care, but it is feasible and a whole lot easier than hand gathering your life's events.
The fidelity of our chronology is improving. Whether that will improve historical or other work is another question.
Posted by: The Other Eric at Sep 22, 2009 3:15:27 PM
"So if I could measure only five things from my daily life, what should they be?"
Most of what I think is worth recording is more qualitative, but you could add a rating system to your qualitative notes if you really wanted to "measure" something.
Two things that I think are worth recording that you're already doing on a qualitative level:
1. Notes on any important ideas/information gleaned from reading books/articles/blogs/etc or watching movies/TV. Maybe you could add a rating system of how important you think each idea or piece of information is, and how relevant it is to various issues. Similar to how you ask people "What's your P?" when you want them to quantify how certain they are in their assertions.
If you switched your blog software from TypePad to WordPress, there are plugins that would allow you to add these sort of ratings to your blog posts and even your readers' comments. In addition to your personal ratings, you could add a crowd-sourcing element and allow your readers to tag and rate posts and comments as well. Your audience is large and thoughtful enough that I think user-generated organization and user-generated moderation could be quite successful here. For implementation, consult your local WordPress guru.
2. Notes on what you've consumed that you've particularly enjoyed and could consume again for additional enjoyment, like your favorite dishes at your favorite restaurants, your favorite music and art, etc. Again, just add a rating system to what you do now.
I think it could also be worthwhile to gather/measure the following private information:
3. Personal journal recording enjoyable experiences with friends and family, both in written entries and pictures and video. A private password-protected blog or EverNote might be good platforms for this.
You could record metadata about people, place, and time, and rate your experiences by how much your enjoyed them. Sort of like the day reconstruction studies. Later you could analyze this data for insight into how you most and least enjoy spending your time (and prioritize accordingly). Or, when you feel like reminiscing, you could use your ratings as an aid to quickly sort your memories and pick out the ones worth dwelling on.
(One amusing example of a quantitative approach to recording "enjoyable" experiences: I knew a guy who kept an Excel spreadsheet in which he logged his every sexual experience -- ranging from daily masturbation to the occasional orgy -- and recorded associated details for each experience, including date, time, place, sexual acts, other people involved, notes on what occurred, and ratings from 1 to 10 for various factors such as how erotic or kinky the experience was and how satisfying his climax. Now I wonder if he ever did any regression analysis on his data set?)
4. Good health-related records and other data that you can periodically review to spot trends, potential future problems, and areas for improvement.
5. Sufficient income and spending data to manage your personal finances well. There are various programs that help you do this; I like Quicken.
(Personally, I'm still undecided about whether Your Money or Your Life's approach of recording every penny that enters or leaves your life is worth the cost of tracking and analyzing all that data -- and I say this even as a budding accountant! -- but if you're able to set up a system for tracking your spending that doesn't take up too much time, and you actually follow through on their exercises for calculating your real hourly rate, how many hours of your life you've traded for various expenditures, and analyzing whether your spending is in line with your values so you can adjust as necessary, then it is probably worth it for most people. It may not be as worth it for you personally, Tyler, because these exercises are mostly aimed at people who want to retire early, whereas you seem to really enjoy what you do for a living and I suspect you would continue to do most of it even if you no longer needed to earn income.)
Technology:
Excel is pretty good for a flat database that you want to do some number-crunching on.
For general note-taking, I really like EverNote. You can get information (notes, documents, pictures, etc.) into it in so many ways via so many platforms (installed software, web, email, text, mobile phone, etc.) and it's easy and intuitive to use. Unfortunately, its metadata capabilities are still very limited (title, date, tags, notebook), so any sort of rating system would have to be implemented awkwardly through tags, and I don't think they do video clips yet either. But every time I turn around it seems they are adding new features, so I'm sure more metadata and video are coming soon.
Usefulness:
Of course, recording your personal data and notes is just the beginning. You need to be able to analyze/synthesize it into useful information, then remember it (internally in your brain or externally in some sort of personal information management system) in the appropriate context as knowledge. So you have to think ahead to how you're actually going to analyze and use all this data later to improve your life and further your goals. I haven't read much about Bell yet, but it sounds like he's doing a lot of recording just for the sake of recording. I don't see the point in that.
This is a subject that I've been reading about/thinking about/experimenting with various tools a lot lately; if I come up with any useful insights or techniques I'll pass them along.
Posted by: Jacqueline at Sep 22, 2009 4:18:53 PM
If you really want to boil all that down into only 5 *measurements* (instead of 5 general areas to measure), then for every good, service, experience, or activity you spend time or money on (over some threshold of materiality), record the following:
1. Time spent
2. Money spent
3. Rate how much you enjoyed it (or disliked it) in the moment, -5 to 5
4. Rate how much it contributed to (or detracted from) your long-term goals, -5 to 5
5. Rate how aligned (or opposed) it was to your personal values, -5 to 5
Review and analyze periodically for a more accurate assessment of how you're spending your life energy. If anything seems out of whack, change your life accordingly.
No, I don't actually do any of this myself, but I may have just talked myself into starting. :)
Posted by: Jacqueline at Sep 22, 2009 4:43:54 PM
I'd like a record of how many times I've opened my web browser with the intention of doing a particular task only to be diverted by another interesting RSS headline from Marginal Revolution. It's happened twice so far today.
I'd also like to have a log of time spent staring off into space thinking about problems.
Posted by: PJ at Sep 22, 2009 5:32:09 PM
1.) Miles run.
2.) Pounds lifted.
3.) Meals consumed.
4.) Stairs climbed
5.) Thoughts generated - It's estimated we have 40,000 thoughts a day. No effective tool to measure these, but it'd be fun to keep track for one day.
Posted by: Ryan Biddulph at Sep 22, 2009 9:37:21 PM
I'd record:
1. what action I was taking;
2. how happy was I during that action, when I thought about it 1 week later, and when I thought about it 5 years later.
3. what I was seeing & hearing (and ideally feeling, smelling, tasting,in that order of priority)
Why the week and 5year feedback delays? Because I may be unhappy right now but happy about the same action later (I'm talking with a friend who's going through a divorce, so I'm unhappy for her but I'm happy I was able to share with her), or the reverse (I'm with a hooker but a week later I'm disgusted at myself). The five year span would be more for passng on lessons to others--"I married too quickly and this is the result" or "I shoulda taken more risks and enjoyed the moment."
Posted by: Laserlight at Sep 23, 2009 11:32:17 AM
