Hacking Happiness (12 page)

This Track Yourself image was created by Rachelle DiGregorio
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as part of her Track Yourself! project. Modeled after the London Underground, the different lines represent different verticals, or areas each quantified self app focuses on. The map provides a great visualization to remind the viewer how all of our behavior intersects at various points in our lives.

To get started on your own self-tracking journey, I recommend you check out the Quantified Self’s Guide to Self-Tracking Tools.
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At the time of writing, it contained 505 QS apps focused on everything from health and medicine to money and mood. Two of my favorite mood-focused apps are MoodPanda and MoodScope. MoodPanda is extremely popular, with over a million registered users regularly recording their emotions. MoodScope adds the unique and compelling feature of e-mailing your self-rated moods to friends in a model based on the “sponsor” model from Alcoholics Anonymous.

The first time I tracked behavior it was definitely empowering. It’s a digital declaration of sorts. But unlike a New Year’s resolution, you don’t have to feel crappy after you bail in four days because you’re looking for patterns that lead to bigger insights than “I like to eat a lot of bacon.”

If you want to get started with a great free tool to track yourself, try iDoneThis, designed for teams in a workplace. Simply write down what you did during the day in an e-mail that’s sent to you at six p.m. every evening. The company is focused on building software “you don’t have to remember to use” and lets you keep a digital diary that validates your actions or those of your team.

The Art of Doing Less

Ari Meisel’s life represents one of the most powerful stories I know in terms of applied life tracking. In 2007, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an incurable disease of the digestive tract. After hitting a low point in the hospital dealing wih multiple medications and discouraging results, Ari began focusing on improving his health with a combination of yoga, nutrition, and exercise. He also began optimizing, automating, and outsourcing daily activities to provide himself the time he needed to get healthy. Fast-forward a few years, and Ari was declared free of all traces of what is considered to be an incurable disease. He even competed in an Ironman competition in France in 2011. It’s a truly inspirational story.

Now Ari focuses on “Achievement Architecture,” working with clients to help them emulate his ability to optimize in various parts of their lives, something he calls the Art of Less Doing. Here’s an excerpt from one of his popular posts, “Don’t Try to Prioritize, Work on Your Timing,” that provides a great lesson for anyone thinking of how to track without the baggage of self-judgment:

Carpe Diem:
This famous saying about seizing the day is actually part of a longer phrase,
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
, which means
Seize the Day and Put Minimum Faith in the Future
. There will always be more tasks and more things that you need to get done. It would be foolish to think that simply arranging tasks in a pecking order will have any bearing on your productivity or your life tomorrow or even an hour from now . . . When it comes down to actually getting things done, we must live in the moment. You assign yourself a task at the relevant moment, you complete the task, and you move on. You don’t worry about what you have to do next because your system will “assign” it to you when the time comes. You are delegating the responsibility of worrying about these things to a system of productivity, the system of Less Doing.
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Technology can help us live more in the moment. Quantified self tools provide a path to help us study ourselves so, after we gain an insight about our behavior, we can optimize accordingly. We just have to get out of our own way to let it happen.

H(app)y and Healthy

As a way to provide more examples on how quantified self tools and other methodologies can increase your happiness and well-being, I’ve included an article I wrote for Mashable called “How Big Data Can Make Us Happier and Healthier.”
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My hope is that it will provide you with a number of ways you can Get H(app)y in your life.

HOW BIG DATA CAN MAKE US HAPPIER AND HEALTHIER

Big Data is getting personal. People around the globe are monitoring everything from their health, sleep patterns, sex, and even toilet habits with articulate detail, aided by mobile technology. Whether users track behavior actively by entering data or passively via sensors and apps, the
quantified self (QS) movement has grown to become a global phenomenon, where impassioned users seek context from their Big Data identities.

Moreover, with services like Saga and Open Sen.se, users can combine multiple streams of data to create insights that inspire broader behavior change than by analyzing a single trait. This reflects a mixed approach design (MAD) research methodology that purposely blends quantitative and qualitative factors in a framework where numbers are driven by nuance. The science of happiness, for example, is now a serious study for business, as organizations combine insights of the head and heart to create environments where workers feel their efforts foster meaningful change.

However it’s studied, the desire to understand monitored behavior has reached a fever pitch, and the QS movement is attempting to meaningfully interpret our daily data.

The Power of Passivity

“We are moving towards a time when the ability to track and understand data is deeply woven into our daily lives,” says Ernesto Ramirez, community organizer for Quantified Self. “Sensors are becoming cheaper and connectivity is more ubiquitous by the day.”

This ever-present nature of data availability will become even more powerful when the general public begins to use apps that require little ongoing attention or input. Passive data collection is especially relevant in the health-care industry, for example.

“The data Quantified Self provides is not a replacement of any measurement to date—we haven’t had this type of measurement to date,” says Halle Tecco, cofounder and CEO of Rockhealth, the first seed accelerator for digital health startups. “Patients live very cautiously before trips to doctors, and
this causes more trips to doctors. It’s better if physicians can get a more comprehensive view of people’s ongoing health.”

Tecco highlights the importance of passive monitoring. For instance, a mobile app can continuously measure glucose levels or other factors like heart rate over time. Spikes in those readings could immediately trigger a doctor, even remotely. “We can save money and improve outcomes by having data collection embedded in our everyday lives,” she adds.

Declaring Your Deeds

Nowadays, people are declaring their daily goals and intentions to peers and seeking their support via social media. Companies like Gympact and StickK operate on accountability-based influence (ABI), a scenario in which you’re judged on your actions versus your words. Beeminder, a “motivational tool that puts your money where your mouth is,” falls into this category too, according to cofounders Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule. Users quantify a goal and pledge to pay money to Beeminder if they fall off the wagon.

“The platform lets users tweak their regimen at any time, with the caveat that any changes take effect with a one-week delay,” says Reeves, “so you can change your commitment, but you can’t change it out of laziness, unless you’re particularly forward-thinking about your laziness.”

According to Reeves and Soule, Beeminder is the only platform that combines the advantages of quantified self-tracking with a commitment contract, a compelling and self-binding form of digital declaration in which users risk a public pledge as a form of accountability for their goals.

Other companies in the QS space offer tangible ways to demonstrate action. A simple framework for tracking positive behavior is provided by uGooder wherein users gain
badges for broadcasting good deeds they’ve completed. The service also lets users print a transcript of all the good deeds they’ve ever done using the platform.

“I thought someday this might be something people could take to a job interview or submit with a college ap-plication to show how much good they have done,” says Dan Lowe, uGooder’s creator. The idea is compelling—why shouldn’t employers or schools focus on overtly positive, community-supported behavior, versus an errant photo of high school revelry?

The rise of portfolio platforms like Pathbrite and LinkedIn’s volunteer profiles encourages people to professionally self-claim their positive behavior. The rise in ABI will eventually supplant trust networks built primarily on words.

The Advantage of Aggregation

“We are of the philosophy that data is versatile,” says Rafi Haladjian, cofounder of Sen.se. “Once you collect data from a source, you can decide how to use it later on.”

Haladjian seems more artist than engineer. He credits the muse of serendipity for guiding data in ways that maximize insights for enlightened users. Sen.se also proselytizes the “Internet of Everything” over the Internet of Things, supporting the idea of the interconnectivity of data when multiple passive sensors work in unison, versus one input alone.

“We need to create the culture of data mashups and we’re finding ways to make that easier,” he says. Demonstrating how to identify unique patterns via these mashups, Haladjian speaks of an elderly parent whose passive sensor placed in her favorite armchair measures how much time she spends sitting. The sensor is one of many placed throughout her home to gauge time spent in various locations or usage
of different appliances, data the woman’s caretaker can use to measure her health.

In this instance, information is collected without its full purpose known beforehand. “If users start to simply collect data in this way,” notes Haladjian, “they can use all sorts of tools to discover the hidden meanings that lie behind the mundane.”

Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, also studies the concept of data mashing. Her concept of the quantified community interprets Big Data as a series of inputs, driven by individuals who wish to improve their communities and world. She describes her vision of quantified community in an article for Project Syndicate: “I predict (and am trying to foster) the emergence of a quantified community movement, with communities measuring the state, health and activities of their people and institutions, thereby improving them.”

For example, she says, when QS tools collect data about health, this data can and should be combined with local health statistics to generate new insights. She also notes the existence of civically minded apps like Street Bump that let users take photographs of or collect data around potholes or other citizen concerns.

This community focus shows how the QS movement can provide a new layer of qualitative data on top of quantified reporting. Think about an app wherein citizens could report their emotional state at seeing a pothole, as well as record its location. QS apps could easily aggregate these emotional tags with obvious economic repercussions. (If you look for good schools when buying a house, wouldn’t you also check the “emotional history” of a neighborhood as well?) Combine this tagging with the ability to search the virtual arena via augmented reality tools like Google Glass and it’s easy to
see how the quantified community will usher in a transformative era of civic engagement.

Emotions in the Enterprise

“Altruism is alive and well on the Internet,” says Paul Marcum, director of global digital marketing and programming for GE and a driver of Healthy Share, a Facebook app that lets users announce health goals and use friends as sources of inspiration. “There is an opportunity to have users ‘pay it forward’ when they build themselves up by helping others,” he says.

The platform proves that the idea of quantified self has taken hold with brands and enterprise. Marcum points out that “sharing is a form of tracking,” that announcing actions via social media is akin to active monitoring via a QS device. “This is information people want to share, and we want to know how to capture that to spark behavior change,” says Marcum. Platforms wherein users are driven by intrinsic motivation and supported by a community let brands get out of the way and understand what truly drives a user base.

“Why is ethical integrity, why is character, not considered an economic asset in a time when trust and reputation are widely heralded as competitive advantages for companies?” asks Tim Leberecht, chief marketing officer of NBBJ, a global design and architecture firm, who while still at his previous role at Frog Design was a driver for the company’s Reinvent Business hackathon, an event to “create concepts and prototypes to help create a more social and human enterprise.”

In a post titled “Hope for the Quantified Self,” he refers to mounting evidence that shows well-being and happiness increase productivity and the bottom line. The result is organizations seeking to understand what truly makes employees happy, how to best blend qualitative along with
quantitative metrics, a practice that may seem foreign to most corporate cultures.

Leberecht has a solution: “We need to find a way to measure the social value created by those whose contributions are outside of the common ROI vocabulary.”