I’m working on a metrics project and have been collecting info about myself as stub data (certainly not the world’s most interesting topic, but a free input stream). I have a base set of questions already, but am hunting for more.
Most of the obvious sources (Flickr/Twitter/Mint/GMail/anything else with a private beta and life-stream) give off “free” data, so I am looking for datapoints that I’ll need to track myself. So far I am logging stuff like mood/stress level, physical activity, ethical decisions, cooking habits. The weirder crap. The stuff that I hope will lend itself to interesting analysis in 12 months time.
If you could look back on a year in your life, what questions would you be interested in asking yourself?
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How about: length of sleep, time in traffic, time at work, time at play, to see if these metrics correlate to your other stats such as stress. Also maybe spending habits in a measurable data point as dollars spent per day/week. I.E. on the day you bought the new gadget/toy were you overall stressed before the purchase and did the purchase make lighten your load, or did the expense just cause greater stress in the days to follow.
I’m hoping to tie personal finance data from Mint.com in with all of my offline data. The time I wake up and goto bed are on that list, but I’m not tracking quality of sleep/feeling in the morning.
Mood is a going to be the tricky one, since I only record stress level and mood once a day, its very possible that an event will transpire in the course of the day which spikes my mood and prompts me to record it at an artificially high or low point.
fitday.com does pretty good tracking on physical fitness tracking
So how are the jamesv Metrics turning out?
Over all, pretty good. Occasionally depressing, but always interesting.
Data sneak peek. Next up is a visualizer utility.