Micro-analysing ones life in this manner is wrong and counter productive on so many levels.
Knowing how many tracks you listen to a day is interesting trivia only.
Knowing how long you sleep for each night could be useful, but only if you have a problem with sleep and know, scientifically, what you're looking for. If you're consistently missing out on sleep and feeling ill as a result, you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this. And if you're not feeling unwell or having sleep problems, then you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this either.
Knowing the number of steps you take is also irrelevant unless it's part of some very slow burn exercise regime you're on, in which case you'd presumably count them anyway. If you're doing normal exercise, steps and heart-rate may be of interest, but only during the exercise period.
In short, knowing all of this info about yourself is not helpful. When it lacks greater context and, unless you know how to interpret it, is just a source of confusion and anxiety. At best, it's novel trivia.
I can only agree that it is generally not very insightful — however, tracking might help some people focus and help them not necessarily understand, but realise, as in take a more emotionally loaded grasp, what is happening. In general, I would refrain from absolute when it comes to motivation science.
One practical application that I have found to Moves (one of the tools listed there, and the most used one) is journaling: not really detailing how much calories I have burned, bus simply where I was, and what I’ve done. The integration with FourSquare is great to help me remember “that great little restaurant I when to when I was in Barcelona… was that in June or April?”
In my experience — admittedly anecdotal and (I wish on everything that is precious) representative to no one — I torn my knee a year ago: ACL, the very bad kind. The pain… I spent a month in bed, convinced for the first two weeks I might not ever walk on my own (that wasn’t remotely possible, and sometimes making a jockish surgeon burst out laughing at your naïveté is all you need to feel oddly better). I still couldn't barely walk and had to: exercise, as soon and as hard as you can, is the only treatment. Moves really helped me track my every step there, and a dozen stepped counted at the time. I am emotionally quite fragile in general, more so then (because the accident had cost me a good client, delayed an interview with an amazing company, forced my long-distance girlfriend and I to cancel holidays together, ridden me to a windowless bed while Spring was finally out) and the pain… Without that bouncy blue dot proclaiming 360 steps was a ‘Personal record!’ I wouldn’t have gone through it nearly as well. Without the app to track on its own the time it took me to tumble on crutches to my very good, very busy and very time-conscious physical therapist (a block away, that is… 20 minutes the first days), I would have had no idea how to be there on time. Not representative, indeed. Bit not useless.
None of the tracking apps that I’ve used have had the expected impact: some revealed to me how my psyche was at stake more than training, some that GPS technology sucks, or that good design is still direly needed… None (with the notable exception of Moves) I’ve used durably, but all have had a positive, eye-opening experience on me. Often, help me realise what you describe quite well. But experiencing it still beats reading about it.
I disagree - certainly about the steps. I use the Moves app on the iPhone, which tracks, without me having to think about it, how far I walk on a daily basis. I've found that it's motivated me to walk further than I used to.
I have a choice on a daily basis whether to walk to work, catch the bus all the way or do some combination of the two. It used to be easy to convince myself that I was walking further than I actually did (things like "I only caught the bus half way today, that's almost the same as walking the whole distance").
But when I've got an app tracking me every step of the way, that's not possible. I can get to Thursday, check my app and realise that I'm several miles short of where I should be, so if I'm going to hit my targets for the week I'd better get walking.
If anything, I'd love to be able to capture more stuff about my life automatically - it would be a lot harder to convince myself that the doughnut I've been given doesn't count because it was free (or whatever my latest lie to myself is) if I've got an app telling me otherwise.
Most people lie to themselves about things like the amount of exercise they do, the amount of junk food they eat and the amount of alcohol they drink. If they could have the truth presented to them as cold hard fact, that would probably be quite an eye opener.
A couple of years back I was working on a solution to track these kinds of things, and what you said is pretty much what I realized while at it. Tracking my sleep actually made me sleep worse because it placed more stress on sleeping. The less I think about it the better I sleep.
What I find more important is tracking what you did in terms of achieving the bigger goals you have. But tracking might not be important here if you have a good system that makes you do work on regular basis to achieve those goals.
The best use of this data isn't for finding problems, but for evaluating solutions:
- Do I sleep better if I don't listen to techno music before going to bed?
- Does not exercising late in the evening help?
- How about not drinking coffee in the afternoon?
- Lowering the room temperature?
Sometimes the effects are obvious, but often they are subtle, and it's easy to delude yourself (for a while at least) that a solution is helping when in fact it isn't.
I agree completely. I believe that this information is useless trivial unless it's (a) embedded in context and (b) consumed experimentally.
By "embedded in context" I mean you need to not just know a larger constellation of interesting information (steps, tracks, mood, location, &c) but also have available information that connects the various data points meaningfully—"I'm blue so I listened to The Cure".
By "consumed experimentally" I mean that you have to have a lever or action which you want to use conditioned on the information gathered. Simply knowing is possibly boring or creepy, but being able to change your own behavior using that information is power. For instance, the opposite causal pathway as above: "I'm listening to The Cure, so now I'm feeling blue" implies a lever you could pull to feel happier. This drives you to want to experiment.
If you have both of those then you're driven to use data like this experimentally and that's pretty wonderful. To anyone who also agrees or is just interested in what you can do with data like this I suggest taking a look at Ian Eslick's "Personal Experiments" [0] which helps direct a user to collect data and invoke an N-of-1 experimental design atop the collection.
> In short, knowing all of this info about yourself is not helpful. When it lacks greater context and, unless you know how to interpret it, is just a source of confusion and anxiety. At best, it's novel trivia.
Isn't that the service that exist.io is hoping to provide? It seems to me like their mission is providing people with greater context than just a bunch of data points. They provide the expertise in interpreting this kind of data so that people don't need to analyze it themselves.
Now, I'm not convinced that they'll be able to provide actionable ways for people to improve their lives, but I certainly hope they can! We generate a lot of data w/out much effort; if we can also use it to improve our lives w/out much effort that's a big win from my perspective.
Isn't that part of the entrepreneurial spirit: having the courage to build something even though you don't yet have all the answers?
Agreed. The real value in this data is when it is grouped with 100s, 1000s or more people. One person's data is a statistical anomaly, group it in a significant sample size, then you get real insights. I agree with their page - selling data is gross, but that's where the value is.
> Knowing the number of steps you take is also irrelevant unless it's part of some very slow burn exercise regime you're on, in which case you'd presumably count them anyway. If you're doing normal exercise, steps and heart-rate may be of interest, but only during the exercise period.
Fitbit assigns me a goal of 10,000 steps per day. I can view the data and work to reach that goal. By being more active I burn more calories, allowing me to lose weight.
Gamification in service of nudging people towards healthier behaviors has value. It's a means to an end. Sometimes just having a concrete goal with a progress meter is all it takes to get a person to make a small but important change.
Being a QS geek myself and partner in a QS based startup, I am always interested in new products.
However, it seems to me that 90% of people doing anything in this space have the same idea: track as much as possible and then try and see if there's anything interesting there.
"44% more likely to check in when you climb more floors" -- big whoop! I suspect that this is exactly the level of insights that you are likely to gain from that sort of approach. You will discover that you are indeed less productive if you don't sleep well or that you tend to have headaches after drinking large amounts of alcohol.
Exploratory data analysis is appealing because we like the idea of discovering something completely unexpected and revolutionary but I think confirmatory analysis (the boring one where you form a hypothesis and set up an experiment to test it) is much more likely to be useful.
If you prefer "confirmatory analysis" over the "correlate all the things" approach then check out zenobase.com (I'm the founder). The answers you get are as smart as the questions you ask :-)
That said, I also just signed up for for Exist.io; the screenshots look great, and I'm curious to see where this leads!
What we're doing works a bit like a Kickstarter. We're asking supporters to back
us for AU$60.
Why charge for 1,000 places?
The maths on 1,000 × 60 means two co-founders working full-time for six months.
This is just enough time for us to get stuck in without worrying about the future
It's also a handy, low number that means we don't have to worry about scaling a
whole lot of data analysis just yet.
Although, I think that should be on the front page. But I like it better than someone setting up a quickie Selfstarter install and waiting for money to roll in.
How many tweets you make? How many tracks you listen to? How is this data going to help you improve your life? Tracking your sleep is one thing. But most of this is just noise.
The name Exist is creepy. As if, you don't truly exist until you can pigeonhole yourself into a couple of statistics. I swear, everyone here is mind blind.
I agree that tweets and tracks probably won’t help you notice any useful patterns. But I don’t see the name Exist as creepy. I interpret it rather as a way of saying that this is very passive software, and all you have to do to use it is to exist normally, as if it’s not there. Like existence is the context of this software, not the product they are selling.
Connect literally five other services for a broader view
This copy seems quite strange. Using literally in this context would traditionally precede an impressive number. "We have literally thousands of service intergrations"... or something.
I agree when read literally (pardon the pun). However, I think the point is that this is a beta product and features are limited; thus the term 'literally' is used ironically in this case.
I've seen enough of those app claiming to be platforms to say: five, actually working, relevant services, correctly pooled together is an impressive number. Not f*cking up the timezones would be a great improvement.
Wow so much dismissal and negativity here. I admit that some of these metrics are trivial and perhaps useless, but I think this is a looking glass into how life will be in the future. Everything in your life will be monitored and there will probably be interesting knowledge that surfaces. For example, I would like to know what foods I eat that effect my mood positively or negatively. I would like to know emergent routines that are detrimental to my health. I would like mountains of data to tell me if I am really happy in my life, and if not what I might consider doing to change that. Understanding these things for ourselves is difficult because we are completely biased and effected by short term noise. Is this service the answer? probably not - but starting somewhere is good.
This kind of tech reminds me of a story from Einstein's Dreams. It's a world of two kinds of people. Those who live close to the Earth living out there lives happily with no reservations and those who live at high altitudes because they believe the higher you are, the longer you'll live. Those who live at high altitudes measure the time they're at lower altitudes with stress and worry then haste back up so as to not get older.
So busy quantifying your life, you forget to actually live your life. My 2 cents.
So, what is the deal with the quantified self obsession? Is it a young persons thing? Has it always been that way and I just missed out on it? Or is it a newer phenomenon that is catching on due to technology making it easier to capture data about ourselves?
I know about my lifestyle. I'm there as it happens. I can't help but feel things like this just lead to a general sense of vexation over details of little consequence.
I strictly measure how much weight I can lift in the gym. This helps me to know if my program is on the right track or not. If things are not progressing upwards I know I have to tweak something.
I not so strictly measure my food intake, but I know enough now to correlate certain diet choices with my effectiveness in the gym.
Things I don't measure but would like to are various hormone levels and other health markers that could probably be worked out with a blood test. I take a number of foods and supplements that are meant to maintain a decent hormone profile - high testosterone, low oestrogen, cortisol etc.. But because I don't measure these I have no idea really if I am doing it right or not.
Another thing I really should measure is my sleep. Although obvious that if I feel dog tired I won't be as effective, I really should measure how much of a sleep deficit I can tolerate so I can balance my work/project time with sleep time effectively.
A few years back, I picked up a Zeo to help answer why I didn't feel rested in the morning. If you had told me the deceptively simple answer before I purchased the Zeo, I would have dismissively laughed at you. Today, the Zeo collects dust and I'm in bed before 10:30p.
These guys live in here Melbourne, cost of living is pretty crazy high. Sure, you could get away with paying yourself less than that, but 60k (less business expenses) puts them in the realm of basic office clerk.
Maybe the startup founder's lot in life is to be poor while they are starting up, so could probably do it with less. But they are hardly overstepping the mark.
Perhaps its a good way to validate the idea / test the market? I wouldn't pay a $1 myself, but if they can get 1,000 people to pay $60, more power to them.
Big data for your personal life.
Only one problem: Big data is amazingly hard to get valuable insight out of. Correlation is relatively easy, but causation? Not so much.
Actually, even if the data isn't big, it's still _really_ hard to figure out causation. If exist.io does make it, It'll be because they figure out just ONE kind of reliable causative relationship they pull out of their data, and they figure out how too monetize that....
This is actually a pretty clever way to crowdsource THAT process though...
Have you tried the app Reporter? It's going down a similar path. I think it uses 5 iPhone sensors and questions that you pre-set and just asks you to report at random times during the day. I've really enjoyed using it so far.
Started making something almost exactly like this just the other day. Although it's more aimed towards how my health/exercise/diet/work/social/mood bounce off each other. Stats like songs played, tweets, etc, don't really hold any value. Would like to see Exist support more manual entry, because a lot of the really valuable personal information won't be found in an API.
This is a really neat concept -- I always thought it was a bit arcane to sign up for disparate services (Fitbit + SumAll for tweet data) with no way to correlate them.
The only odd part is the backer model: unless they have over 1,000 users on the waiting list who have committed to buying it, it seems like they should have a prominent button to pay and start using it somewhere, rather than email invite.
Good point. We didn't plan on making the campaign public quite yet as we've been focused on giving people on our waiting list first dibs. Since everyone knows what's going on now, we've adjusted the home page to make the process of backing Exist more simple.
[+] [-] _mulder_|12 years ago|reply
Knowing how many tracks you listen to a day is interesting trivia only.
Knowing how long you sleep for each night could be useful, but only if you have a problem with sleep and know, scientifically, what you're looking for. If you're consistently missing out on sleep and feeling ill as a result, you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this. And if you're not feeling unwell or having sleep problems, then you shouldn't need exist.io to tell you this either.
Knowing the number of steps you take is also irrelevant unless it's part of some very slow burn exercise regime you're on, in which case you'd presumably count them anyway. If you're doing normal exercise, steps and heart-rate may be of interest, but only during the exercise period.
In short, knowing all of this info about yourself is not helpful. When it lacks greater context and, unless you know how to interpret it, is just a source of confusion and anxiety. At best, it's novel trivia.
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertil|12 years ago|reply
One practical application that I have found to Moves (one of the tools listed there, and the most used one) is journaling: not really detailing how much calories I have burned, bus simply where I was, and what I’ve done. The integration with FourSquare is great to help me remember “that great little restaurant I when to when I was in Barcelona… was that in June or April?”
In my experience — admittedly anecdotal and (I wish on everything that is precious) representative to no one — I torn my knee a year ago: ACL, the very bad kind. The pain… I spent a month in bed, convinced for the first two weeks I might not ever walk on my own (that wasn’t remotely possible, and sometimes making a jockish surgeon burst out laughing at your naïveté is all you need to feel oddly better). I still couldn't barely walk and had to: exercise, as soon and as hard as you can, is the only treatment. Moves really helped me track my every step there, and a dozen stepped counted at the time. I am emotionally quite fragile in general, more so then (because the accident had cost me a good client, delayed an interview with an amazing company, forced my long-distance girlfriend and I to cancel holidays together, ridden me to a windowless bed while Spring was finally out) and the pain… Without that bouncy blue dot proclaiming 360 steps was a ‘Personal record!’ I wouldn’t have gone through it nearly as well. Without the app to track on its own the time it took me to tumble on crutches to my very good, very busy and very time-conscious physical therapist (a block away, that is… 20 minutes the first days), I would have had no idea how to be there on time. Not representative, indeed. Bit not useless.
None of the tracking apps that I’ve used have had the expected impact: some revealed to me how my psyche was at stake more than training, some that GPS technology sucks, or that good design is still direly needed… None (with the notable exception of Moves) I’ve used durably, but all have had a positive, eye-opening experience on me. Often, help me realise what you describe quite well. But experiencing it still beats reading about it.
[+] [-] prof_hobart|12 years ago|reply
I have a choice on a daily basis whether to walk to work, catch the bus all the way or do some combination of the two. It used to be easy to convince myself that I was walking further than I actually did (things like "I only caught the bus half way today, that's almost the same as walking the whole distance").
But when I've got an app tracking me every step of the way, that's not possible. I can get to Thursday, check my app and realise that I'm several miles short of where I should be, so if I'm going to hit my targets for the week I'd better get walking.
If anything, I'd love to be able to capture more stuff about my life automatically - it would be a lot harder to convince myself that the doughnut I've been given doesn't count because it was free (or whatever my latest lie to myself is) if I've got an app telling me otherwise.
Most people lie to themselves about things like the amount of exercise they do, the amount of junk food they eat and the amount of alcohol they drink. If they could have the truth presented to them as cold hard fact, that would probably be quite an eye opener.
[+] [-] mattikl|12 years ago|reply
What I find more important is tracking what you did in terms of achieving the bigger goals you have. But tracking might not be important here if you have a good system that makes you do work on regular basis to achieve those goals.
[+] [-] ejain|12 years ago|reply
- Do I sleep better if I don't listen to techno music before going to bed?
- Does not exercising late in the evening help?
- How about not drinking coffee in the afternoon?
- Lowering the room temperature?
Sometimes the effects are obvious, but often they are subtle, and it's easy to delude yourself (for a while at least) that a solution is helping when in fact it isn't.
[+] [-] tel|12 years ago|reply
By "embedded in context" I mean you need to not just know a larger constellation of interesting information (steps, tracks, mood, location, &c) but also have available information that connects the various data points meaningfully—"I'm blue so I listened to The Cure".
By "consumed experimentally" I mean that you have to have a lever or action which you want to use conditioned on the information gathered. Simply knowing is possibly boring or creepy, but being able to change your own behavior using that information is power. For instance, the opposite causal pathway as above: "I'm listening to The Cure, so now I'm feeling blue" implies a lever you could pull to feel happier. This drives you to want to experiment.
If you have both of those then you're driven to use data like this experimentally and that's pretty wonderful. To anyone who also agrees or is just interested in what you can do with data like this I suggest taking a look at Ian Eslick's "Personal Experiments" [0] which helps direct a user to collect data and invoke an N-of-1 experimental design atop the collection.
[0] https://personalexperiments.org/
[+] [-] snikeris|12 years ago|reply
Isn't that the service that exist.io is hoping to provide? It seems to me like their mission is providing people with greater context than just a bunch of data points. They provide the expertise in interpreting this kind of data so that people don't need to analyze it themselves.
Now, I'm not convinced that they'll be able to provide actionable ways for people to improve their lives, but I certainly hope they can! We generate a lot of data w/out much effort; if we can also use it to improve our lives w/out much effort that's a big win from my perspective.
Isn't that part of the entrepreneurial spirit: having the courage to build something even though you don't yet have all the answers?
[+] [-] rz7qpx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JeremyNT|12 years ago|reply
Fitbit assigns me a goal of 10,000 steps per day. I can view the data and work to reach that goal. By being more active I burn more calories, allowing me to lose weight.
Gamification in service of nudging people towards healthier behaviors has value. It's a means to an end. Sometimes just having a concrete goal with a progress meter is all it takes to get a person to make a small but important change.
[+] [-] loceng|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristiandupont|12 years ago|reply
However, it seems to me that 90% of people doing anything in this space have the same idea: track as much as possible and then try and see if there's anything interesting there.
"44% more likely to check in when you climb more floors" -- big whoop! I suspect that this is exactly the level of insights that you are likely to gain from that sort of approach. You will discover that you are indeed less productive if you don't sleep well or that you tend to have headaches after drinking large amounts of alcohol.
Exploratory data analysis is appealing because we like the idea of discovering something completely unexpected and revolutionary but I think confirmatory analysis (the boring one where you form a hypothesis and set up an experiment to test it) is much more likely to be useful.
[+] [-] ejain|12 years ago|reply
That said, I also just signed up for for Exist.io; the screenshots look great, and I'm curious to see where this leads!
[+] [-] timdorr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] normloman|12 years ago|reply
The name Exist is creepy. As if, you don't truly exist until you can pigeonhole yourself into a couple of statistics. I swear, everyone here is mind blind.
[+] [-] nobbyclark|12 years ago|reply
> SHARE WITH FRIENDS
Because highly personal data needs to be shared with your friends. Just because.
Actually the real feature here would be "SHARE WITH MOM" for those mothers who always call to ask "Are you getting enough sleep?"
[+] [-] roryokane|12 years ago|reply
I agree that tweets and tracks probably won’t help you notice any useful patterns. But I don’t see the name Exist as creepy. I interpret it rather as a way of saying that this is very passive software, and all you have to do to use it is to exist normally, as if it’s not there. Like existence is the context of this software, not the product they are selling.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] orofino|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeqsee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertil|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deft|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hueving|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarymax|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnybgood|12 years ago|reply
So busy quantifying your life, you forget to actually live your life. My 2 cents.
[+] [-] djb_hackernews|12 years ago|reply
I'm really curious.
[+] [-] weego|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devindotcom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiritplumber|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visakanv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brador|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weavie|12 years ago|reply
I not so strictly measure my food intake, but I know enough now to correlate certain diet choices with my effectiveness in the gym.
Things I don't measure but would like to are various hormone levels and other health markers that could probably be worked out with a blood test. I take a number of foods and supplements that are meant to maintain a decent hormone profile - high testosterone, low oestrogen, cortisol etc.. But because I don't measure these I have no idea really if I am doing it right or not.
Another thing I really should measure is my sleep. Although obvious that if I feel dog tired I won't be as effective, I really should measure how much of a sleep deficit I can tolerate so I can balance my work/project time with sleep time effectively.
[+] [-] garrickvanburen|12 years ago|reply
Full write up here: https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/how-i-learned-to-get-up-...
[+] [-] balls187|12 years ago|reply
30k per founder for 6 months seems like quite a lot of money.
[+] [-] wakeless|12 years ago|reply
Maybe the startup founder's lot in life is to be poor while they are starting up, so could probably do it with less. But they are hardly overstepping the mark.
[+] [-] kapkapkap|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aashishkoirala|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Codhisattva|12 years ago|reply
"figuratively.io - a metaphorical API clearinghouse"
YC15 if you want to co-found with me.
[+] [-] bertil|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dschiptsov|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rantenki|12 years ago|reply
Actually, even if the data isn't big, it's still _really_ hard to figure out causation. If exist.io does make it, It'll be because they figure out just ONE kind of reliable causative relationship they pull out of their data, and they figure out how too monetize that....
This is actually a pretty clever way to crowdsource THAT process though...
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mjewkes|12 years ago|reply
N times per day, for M seconds, turn on all my phone's sensors and take a short video capture of my computer screen.
Then upload that data (preferably to my own server, not yours).
Every couple days, I'll log on and tag the data. At 17:56 on 12/05, I was sleeping, working on X, talking to Y, going to Z, etc.
Sample 3-4 times a day for a year. Should get a really clear and interesting picture of your life after 3 months or so.
[+] [-] bellebethcooper|12 years ago|reply
http://www.reporter-app.com
[+] [-] bertil|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lennington|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shank|12 years ago|reply
The only odd part is the backer model: unless they have over 1,000 users on the waiting list who have committed to buying it, it seems like they should have a prominent button to pay and start using it somewhere, rather than email invite.
[+] [-] bellebethcooper|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aoyagi|12 years ago|reply
So many assumptions.