#quantified-self

Le quantified-self est il à risque ? #FSP15

Le quantified-self est il à risque ?

La 9ème édition du Forum Santé Publique Sanofi à peine terminée, les discussions et échanges ont repris sur le groupe LINKEDIN dédié afin de contribuer aux débats sur la transformation nécessaire (et inéluctable ?) de notre système de santé.

le Forum Santé Publique Sanofi #FSP15

J’ai été interpelé par cette discussion lancée suite à cet articleparu sur le site…

The Napa Earthquake was the strongest to hit Northern California in 25 years. See how it impacted the sleep of UP wearers in the Bay Area.

Kevin Nguyen, from The BYGONE BUREAU, writes:

“The quantified self” is a technocratic movement that encourages self-tracking data. Broadly, the quantified self could mean acquiring data on everything — one’s environment, health, and activities. Usually, it means people tracking their daily step-count on a Fitbit.

Reporter is a new app that takes the notion of the quantified self, crosses it with journaling, and dresses it in bold colors and nice typography. It pings you at random points throughout the day to ask you questions about what you’re doing, who you’re with, and where you are. Default questions include “Are you working right now?” and “How did you sleep?” The goal of Reporter is to measure how you spend your day and to identify long-term patterns in your behavior. In an interview with The Verge, Drew Breunig, a developer behind Reporter, believes the data will be instructive, since it highlights aspects of your life you might not regularly contemplate: “I want you to be scared by your routine, or by decisions you haven’t thought about because you don’t want to face them.”

Having used the app for a couple weeks, nothing about my routine really scared me. Outside of the app’s pleasant visual aesthetic, there was little else of interest. Brendan O’Connor listed his gripes at The Daily Dot (most of which I agree with), namely that the sorts of data Reporter collects is tedious. He writes, “The aspects of our lives that make us who we are — the people we love and the people who love us, our passions and obsessions, our flaws and our work and our deepest, darkest secrets — clearly surpass the imagination of apps like Reporter. What dull lives we would lead if these (‘How many cups of coffee did you have today?’) were the most important questions we could ask ourselves.”

Though the defaults certainly don’t encourage creativity, one could argue that Reporter is only as unimaginative as its user, since it allows you to customize the questions. I added two queries of my own: “Are you reading or writing?” and “Did you exercise today?”

On one hand, I’m identifying what parts of my life are important to me. I like the idea that I’m someone who writes and works out regularly enough to track it. On the other hand, by deciding to quantify these things about myself specifically, I am creating an identity for my most idealized self. I collect this data because it’s how I want to construct the narrative of my life.

Most of the buzz around Reporter comes from the app’s proprietor, Nicholas Felton, a former designer at Facebook who conceived the Timeline and the Open Graph. Felton has also been an early proponent of the quantified self, releasing annual reports on his life since 2005 (though it seems the attention they receive has more to do with how nicely they are designed rather than what data is represented).

Before being acquired by Facebook, Felton created a service called Daytum, self-described as “an elegant and intuitive tool for counting and communicating personal statistics.” Felton’s Daytum profile is used as an example of a “personal dashboard.” It displays the number of miles he ran, cities he’d vacationed to, and celebrities he’d sighted. What we’re supposed to take from his profile is that Nicholas Felton is a runner, a jetsetter, a person who regularly spots Terry Richardson. But this is the information he chooses to display about himself; the data he collects projects the type of person he wants us to see.

“Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.” Alfred North Whitehead

Modern neuroscience backs up Mr Whitehead's intuitions: we have finite cognitive resources. Every choice we make depletes them. I try to minimise unnecessary decisions, so I can concentrate on what matters.

One way I do this is using pomodoros. I set a timer for twenty-five minutes, blast white noise through my headphones and turn off all notifications. Then I focus on doing one thing (e.g. coding, working through my todo list, answering emails, writing documentation). When the timer goes off, I take a five minute break to chat with coworkers, stretch, check notifications, etc. Then I decide what to do next.

Before I started doing this, I'd have a background process that was constantly asking:

what's the time?

is it time to stop focussing?

am I working on the right thing?

should I check my emails now?

Answering those questions distracted me from the task at hand, and reduced my precious, finite supply of daily willpower. But they were necessary: if I didn't ask them, I could work on one silly thing for a whole day without stopping.

But I don't get asked them anymore. After having its interrupt signals ignored for so long, that noisy background task has learnt to shut down until I pay attention to it in my five minute break. And it only works because I have a system where I can trust that those questions will get answered in a timely fashion.

Spending more time in flow tends to makes you happier and more productive. But most of us don't attempt to measure the proportion of time we spend in flow, let alone experiment with ways to increase it. So I'm going to start tracking today, with a simple spreadsheet that records:

when my pom started

level of challenge

level of interest

level of "reward"

my flow score from 1 to 10

if I was standing or sitting

any notes or observations

I've pledged $30 to this Beeminder to make it more likely that I'll keep it up.

One of the best things about pairing is when your partner says “Why are you doing that? Haven't you heard of X?” where X is:

a Sublime Text plugin

a zsh snippet

some fancy git technique

a more-appropriate method (like Array#each_with_object)

And it's not just micro-optimisations around tooling — I've gotten feedback on how and when I write tests, what to include in commits, when to refactor, and even how I take breaks.

But why are we limiting that advice to the few people who are a) nearby and b) interested enough in your growth to help you for free?

I want to capture an hour-long video of my screen while I code and send it off to someone to tell me how I could be doing things better. I'm going to try it out this week. I'll tell you how it goes (and maybe even post my video…).