Metrics of the Quantified Self

One example of living a life based on metrics that stands out most for me is that of Nicholas Felton. He not only lives a life drenched in measurement and metrics, he makes money doing it through publication of Personal Reports.

He is one of the pioneers of the whole-metric solution to life and work known as the Quantified Self movement. He tracks the most minuscule of data, every piece of daily minutia: mood, cab rides versus subway rides, health data, time traveled each year, locations he’s in, health data, computer use data, conversation data, and more.

From Felton’s website, you can see the blurb he used to describe one of his reports (see Figure 20-7) and what he tried to learn with his daily data tracking and analytics (each of which sells for between $25 and $65, usually):

Philip K. Dick claimed that “a person’s authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships.”

The Feltron 2010/2011 Biennial Report explores this notion by overlapping facets of Nicholas’ behavior to visualize how his personality varies based on location and company.

—Nicholas Felton

If the Quantified Self movement interests you in the ways you can apply it to your business metrics and decisions as well as your life and health, you can find out more about it (or meet others who are into this massive tracking of personal data over time and real life application of it) through the Quantified Self site at http://quantifiedself.com . Or you can jump right to the 400-plus apps geared toward gathering and measuring data of the self-found at http://quantifiedself.com/guide .