Tracking.. Like buffalo?
I track my homework, work schedule, and workout schedule in my agenda. However this method of tracking could hardly be a tool for the quantified self. There is not extraction of data, only the input of information. The agenda is merely a place to store information, it would be very difficult to extract data from it. Maybe I could go through and look at my handwriting or the color pen I was using to inquire about how I was feeling that day.
This is to say I have very little interaction with tracking on my phone with conscious effort of know more about myself. I have never been a fan of tracking my behavior, I guess I’m somewhat private in that way.
So I have gotten a little creative in the “tools” I use for my quantified self.
When I workout I use one tool to track my workout. It’s called a watch, it times my workout. That’s it, I workout for 45 minutes, I use my watch to time how long I have been actively working out. That’s it, I don’t try and measure the calories I’ve burned, or the peak heart rate reached. I base my workout on how I feel, if I’m tired I may take more breaks and slow down. If it’s a good day I try and see how far I can push my body, but it’s all based on how I feel.
I do track my spending, I bank with Wells Fargo and their banking app is rather impressive (but I don’t utilize it). You can see how much money you are spending, where you are spending it, and when you’re spending it. They have charts and bar graphs to visualize your spending habits. It’s really quite impressive for the conscious spender. But for me, if I feel like I have spent too much money I check my bank account. In synopsis I don’t self track I’ve had found that self tracking ends up making me feel stressed. I listen to my body more than anything else.
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I like your idea of tracking your body during your workout based on how your body feels. I think maybe this is something that I should start doing more. I recently started seriously working out daily and by the time I finish my workout on DailyBurn I don’t always feel as though I’ve done enough so I should track my workout based on how my body feels.
I really loved this post! I am actually very similar in my self-tracking habits in that I don’t really have many. The ones you mentioned in the post are fairly identical to mine, especially in terms of working out and tracking money spent. Wells Fargo is my bank, too, and while I can see all the spending that I do, I don’t actually use the separate Wells Fargo app to check out everrryyything that I could–nor do I want to.
I’m somewhat private in the way that I self-track as well because I am weird about letting people know things, and I feel like nobody would ever care anyway? But, after learning a lot about the Quantified Self and the way that it relates to big data, I now think about things in terms of how even though I don’t actively share information of mine, it is still going somewhere. For instance, I could (and definitely should) track my spending habits a bit more, but I don’t worry about that for now. However, there may be a team of people working at Wells Fargo who watch out for people our age–college kids–and maybe they conduct some type of data experiment of research practice that gathers facts and statistics about our lives. Where are we most likely to spend money? How much money are we likely to spend in X, Y, and Z? I have a “college cash back” credit card from Wells Fargo, and ever since this unit, I’ve been considering why and how Wells Fargo might developed this credit-building program.