Oct 18, 2010

Self-tracking update

As I've noted before, the reason why I keep daily in-depth data on myself has nothing to do with finding hidden truths nor even testing hypotheses, but occasionally I will analyze a batch of data anyway just for pure geeky enjoyment. The latest batch includes 257 days between January and September, and while I can't say that I learned much, maybe something will surprise you in the correlation matrix below.



Consistent with past batches, the only real surprises are the lack of noticeable correlations. For example, the amount of exercise I get is apparently unrelated to my mood, how much or how well I eat, or even my wakefulness. And how much I sleep or eat also seems unrelated to any outcomes of interest.

If there are any specific things you think would be interesting to test (either with this data or with future data), let me know.

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I have been keeping daily in-depth data on myself since September 2008. While the process for collecting data has remained basically the same (entering it into a Google Docs spreadsheet every night), the types of data I collect has changed considerably. You can read all about what I do, why I do it, and what I've learned by browsing the posts tagged as 'self-track', or feel free to ask questions.

Three blogs I highly recommend related to self-tracking are The Quantified Self, Seth Roberts, and Matthew Cornell.