Why Track Yourself?

With all the media attention on self-tracking lately (Wall Street Journal, Globe and Mail, GOOD), you might be wondering whether to give it a try for yourself. But the polarized comments on these articles and the labeling of self-tracking as narcissism might be causing doubt.

Here’s a special guest post from CureTogether co-founder Daniel Reda to offer reasons for why tracking yourself is a good idea. And a beautiful image compiled by the Globe and Mail, on the cover of today’s Life section.

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“Whether it’s science, business, politics or your personal life, you can’t effectively understand, manage or improve what you don’t measure.

Human intuitive judgments, even those of experts, are systematically biased. Hundreds of studies have revealed that our decision making, memories, evaluations, estimates (e.g. how long a project will take to complete) and even assessments of how happy something made us in the past or predictions of how happy we would be if something happened in the future (e.g. if we won the lottery) turn out to be quite inaccurate.

It’s humbling, but increasingly clear that the human mind has been optimized over millions of years to solve certain kinds of problems essential to our survival very well (e.g. is this food safe to eat? is this a good mate? is this person a friend or a foe?). It was not optimized to practice law or medicine, do project management or even to predict what will make us happy.

Collecting data and analyzing it objectively is an effort to overcome our very real human limitations – to become better at managing all aspects of our lives, both personal and social.

Whether it’s applied to improving the quality of sex or to improving medical care in developing countries, its superiority over intuitive decisions is increasingly difficult to dispute. To label it narcissism is to judge its application, not its power.

The funny thing is that quickly dismissing it as narcissism is itself one of those intuitive judgments that turn out to be wrong when you look at the data (http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2009/02/are-self-trackers-narcissists.php)

You are free to live life by the seat of your pants, but you can’t deny that if you want to improve something, those who objectively measure, test and optimize will consistently achieve better results.”

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