Jan
17
Personal Metrics
Filed Under Organization
I’ve been enjoying Nicholas Felton’s 2007 Feltron Annual Report this week. Mr. Felton publishes yearly statistics about himself in the form of an annual company report. I find this document fascinating on several levels.
First, Felton is a graphic designer by trade and the report works as a portfolio piece for prospective work. Second, the document reveals something about the author. Not only do we see statistics like number of book pages read and beers consumed, we see Felton as someone who is willing to compile such statistics about himself. Third, the report is simply beautiful and intriguing.
Mr. Felton is not alone in his journey to quantify his life. An article in Print Magazine last year, entitled The Obsessives, brought together Felton and several other artists to document their consumption for a week. How each artist collected the data is nearly as interesting as how each chose to present the results.
Another example of personal data collection is Craig Robinson’s Personal Pies. Mr. Robinson presents key data about his life in the form of pie charts. Again, fascinating stuff.
It seems the world is full of personal data collectors. One could dismiss this as another syndrome of the times, a need for everyone to feel important. But there is something more going on here.
While Mr. Felton and Mr. Robinson each tell a story with their statistics, there is a key difference in how they choose to tell these stories. Felton uses an overwhelming quantity of data to show a complete picture of his daily life. Robinson uses more esoteric measurements, such as “% of life that my father was alive” and “% of life interested in baseball”. The resulting picture of each man is quite different, but each is compelling.
What may appear as simple onanism is actually a representation about how we all seek control in our lives. We are each increasingly harried and digitized, spread apart by responsibilities, distracted by media, and reduced to numeric ID by all institutions. Doesn’t it make sense that people should want to exert some kind of control (or illusion thereof) over their lives? Further, gathering data in this manner may actually be useful. Our country is out of control in its consumption of resources. Perhaps we would all be a little more conscientious if we woke up every morning to see a graph illustrating the amount of garbage we had generated over the past year. Perhaps we would stop complaining about the price of gasoline. Perhaps we would start thinking about changes on the personal level.
I tinkered with some personal data collection last year. For a month, I tracked chewing gum (60 pieces), Diet Coke (75 cans), hours of sleep (avg 6.425 hours), and several other useless metrics. I was going to post these in the form of sparkline graphs. In the end, I gave it up. I didn’t like the story it was telling. Sure, I was killing the caffeine, but this was the same month my son was born.
Perhaps I need to pick better metrics next time.
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Just found your blog (Rachel hunting Sam pictures)
That report is great.
I would have trouble keeping track of things myself, but I should do this with data already collected.
Skymiles
Vacation days
He only had 22 sodas in 2007?
22 sodas in a year makes my 75 cans in April look a little disgusting. I’m always amazed when I find a group of people who are way into a topic that I’ve never given much thought to. Data collectors are a good example. There is an active population of people who crunch data for pure pleasure. The Internet has made this much easier as all kinds of new data sets are available.
I’m interested to see if people can start to discover independent trends through mining this data–stuff ignored by traditional outlets. More to come.