Michael Parekh sent me an excellent article from NYT by Gary Wolf. A very well researched article on a very important topic.
Clearly, time has come to start using data from our own life to perform self-analytics and use this for actionable self-knowledge. Most of us, conveniently engage in self deception on many fronts. It is just a ‘characteristics’ of human nature that you underestimate undesirable events and overestimate desirable ones. Thus you tend to overestimate how many times you ate salad and understimate how many times you ate french fries. Now that sensors and mobile phones are making all this data easily collectible and analyzable, time has come to develop some simple approaches and products that could bring analytics to help us.
Thanks for the updates and the link.Checked the article out on data driven life and i must it’s very well written.You are right in your saying that we humans tend to overestimate desirable things and vice versa.Sensors and mobile phones have advanced to a great extent,thus making a lot of our jobs simpler.Look forward to hearing from you soon again.
Thanks for giving the link to the wonderful post by Gary Wolf.Truly a very important topic.In fact i have bookmarked the page too.You have rightly pointed out the cases where we underestimate something that should not have been underestimated.I hope analytics can be used in a more productive manner.Do keep me informed on the latest development.
Self-analytics is apparently a new phrase for accountability. To soften your words, we lie to ourselves too often, skew facts in our favor, and try to make ourselves believe that what we are doing is good for us when it really isn’t. If we, as a society, took responsibility for all of our actions all of the time, then there would be great improvements in health, debt, and most other plagues of this country.
Ramesh, Good post. I try to analyze the productivity of my efforts on a weekly basis but I have never found a good way to create a baseline which would help me identify how variables effect my productivity. Thus, I have to go by dollars and the market seems to be fair.
Thanks for the stimulating post.
Eric
I think this work is important, and Gary’s piece was seminal. These ideas generalize into a wider life-as-experiment perspective, and I’d like to link to my response and outline of how it all might fit together here: The Experiment-Driven Life (http://www.matthewcornell.org/2010/06/the-experiment-driven-life.html). Also, we’re working on a tool for self-experimenters, called Edison (http://edison.thinktrylearn.com/). Great stuff!