Ask Slashdot: Do You Find Self Tracking Useful Like Stephen Wolfram Does? 139
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by
timothy
from the impress-your-doctor-with-a-preemptive-stool-sample dept.
from the impress-your-doctor-with-a-preemptive-stool-sample dept.
New submitter Manzanita writes "The domain of personal analytics, or 'Quantified Self,' is rich with interesting things to measure and many hackers have started projects. But they will only take off if it is sufficiently easy to gather and use the data. Stephen Wolfram has collected and analyzed a lot of his personal data over the last 20 years, but that is far beyond what most of us have the time for. What do you find worth tracking? What is ripe for developing into a business?"
Not tolerable for the average person (Score:5, Insightful)
Any studies yet that ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... indicate at what point collecting and analyzing personal data becomes indicative of a narcissistic personality disorder?
Memory pruning (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of a healthy mind is the ability to forget unimportant or no longer relevant information in favor of more recent and accurate things. If i tracked myself I wouldn't be able to forget the unimportant or push aside the less desirable. I would be governed by old data and held to means and modes of things that may not reflect current realities.
This seems more like punishment than an aid.
Re:Not tolerable for the average person (Score:5, Insightful)
But I enjoy my play time. A moment enjoyed is never a moment wasted.
Re:Any studies yet that ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally at the beginning, when one starts voluntarily aggregating it.
It's one thing to write a journal, it's another to maintain data when not required to. The stuff I keep organized are either all required (taxes and other mandated record keeping) or things that are part of collections that I don't want to buy in redundancy (movies, books, music), or things that need records to ensure reliability and functionality (auto and house maintenance).
Pictures we take are usually sorted just by date, and we occasionally browse through them, like a normal photo album. The only major exception to that is when we were house-hunting, and those pictures were functional records. Most of those house photos have been archived or deleted, unless we saw something cool that we'd want to do to our house.
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Traffic patterns (Score:4, Insightful)
Noted things down in his log, of course!
Completely useless data (Score:4, Insightful)
It's an exercise in gathering completely useless data.
How many people on Slashdot still have emails they sent in 1990? 1991? 1992? How many of those emails that you still have are actually relevant today? Worse still, how relevant to today is it to know how many emails you sent in 1990, 1991 or 1992?
Even more useless....number of keystrokes per day for the last 10 years.
This guy is going to die someday and his wife and kids are going to toss all this crap right into the dustbin.
If it's important to you, you should track it. (Score:3, Insightful)