Measure of the man: nerds on the write track

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This was published 13 years ago

Measure of the man: nerds on the write track

By Peter Munro

JAMIE ROSS woke in the dark at 5am, after a good sleep of six hours and 15 minutes. He then went jogging for 42 minutes at an average speed of 6km/h and burned 589 calories, his short black Staffordshire-cross, Elvis, by his side. Through the morning, he ate four pieces of fruit: an apple, a banana, a mandarin and a kiwi fruit.

Each detail he recorded in the spreadsheet of his life.

Jamie Ross with some of his self-tracking spreadsheets. "It's a little bit obsessive and it is quite nerdy. But the numbers don't lie," he says.

Jamie Ross with some of his self-tracking spreadsheets. "It's a little bit obsessive and it is quite nerdy. But the numbers don't lie," he says.

Last Wednesday was entry No. 2921 in a daily reckoning of columns and numbers Mr Ross has titled JR Log version III.

Across hundreds of pages, over eight years, he has collected and plotted much of the minute data that makes up a life, including working hours, sleep, exercise, diet, productivity and weight. Each day of his life, he scores from A to C. Last Wednesday was an A, a great day.

''You can't manage what you can't measure,'' he says.

Mr Ross, 30, an engineer from Kew with cropped dark hair and gnawed fingernails, is a self-tracker, collecting and tallying the minutia of each day, searching for insight, self-improvement or the secret codes to the patterns of the universe.

New tracking devices encourage such self-accounting: digital heart-rate monitors and running watches with inbuilt global positioning systems; websites to monitor alcohol consumption, calories, illness, mood or sexual encounters; mobile phone applications that lie next to your pillow at night, tallying your sleep.

Digital graphs assemble the tiny pieces into an estimable whole, which self-trackers often share through social media.

After years tracking films, music, thoughts or photographs, the new subject of scrutiny is ourselves. The New York Times recently called the trend ''constructing a quantified self''.

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Self-trackers typically start with a specific goal but then can't stop recording. One man

has kept a detailed archive of all his ideas for more than 25 years, now numbering more than a million. Partly, it's because they can: electronic sensors become smaller and more powerful, taking the guesswork and intuition out of recording behaviours.

Mr Ross started his study on Monday, June 3, 2002 as part of a training log for a marathon.

He sees his spreadsheets as a teacher, motivating him to go to bed early, eat well and exercise, and chiding him when he slackens. ''I look on it the same way as I would look at data at work. You are just looking for trends and relationships,'' he says.

''It's a little bit obsessive and it is quite nerdy. But the numbers don't lie. I think in some ways you get a better view of how the bigger picture is made up of one day at a time.''

Emmy Kerrigan, 35, sees her life as a stack of numbers assembled into a manageable whole. She runs a website development company in Cairns and tracks her working day in six-minute increments, including coffee and meal breaks, and time spent on Facebook.

She also tracks her daily water consumption (1.848 litres) and morning runs (she averages 2.6 kilometres at 8.3km/h). ''Time is money and I like to know I'm not wasting time,'' she says. ''Every time I look at the end of the day and think, yeah, I did that, it's a good feeling. I am a whole bunch of numbers.''

This year, she started tracking her unconscious, too, through a mobile application called Sleep Cycle. Nestled under the sheets by her head at night, her iPhone analyses her movements and uses the data to wake her at the optimal time in her sleep cycle. In 2008, she spent almost $1000 seeing a sleep therapist and spending nights at a sleep clinic, strapped to electronic monitors. But she reckons her $1.19 app has helped her wake fresh and to work more effectively.

Such devices have helped bring self-tracking into the home, removing control of such data from statisticians and scientists. Social media expert Ross Monaghan, of Deakin University, says the change to a digital society has facilitated the collection, tracking and analysis of data in just about everything we do. Such records help connect people with similar interests or concerns, particularly in fitness groups. ''It does motivate you when you know other people are going to be looking at your performance as well,'' he says. Mr Monaghan is concerned by the potential misuse of such personal information by others, particularly marketers. He also wonders at the worth of analysing a life to such a degree that it just becomes a file of data. ''In some ways, I think you can see it as quite dehumanising. Life is art; it's not a science,'' he says.

''I think keeping a journal can be a wonderful experience, but to me, keeping a spreadsheet of your whole life is just weird. I don't want to analyse my life down to the last nanosecond or millilitre of coffee.''

Each year, New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton, 32, publishes parts of his life in The Feltron Annual Report, his name altered slightly to reflect the mechanical nature of his project. Since 2005, he has tracked the books he has read, songs listened to, photographs taken and postcards received.

One year, he tracked every single street he walked down. He knows he discovered his first grey hair on June 20, 2006. And in a single year, he killed four plants.

His 2009 report, of which he has sold 1500 copies, includes data from friends he tasked with describing his mood each time they met. ''I think there is an external fascination with this kind of insight into others' lives and it's a catalyst for self-reflection,'' he says.

''Maybe it's an addiction or obsessive compulsion.''

Such self-knowledge can prove a burden for some. Alexandra Carmichael is co-founder of US website Cure Together, where users can connect with people who share similar illnesses and track the effect of treatments. For 18 months, she tracked 40 things about her body each day, including her meal times, exercise, mood, menstrual cycle, calories and sexual activity (by quantity and quality). She discovered her mood went up significantly on days she did more exercise and dropped when she ate poorly.

But this year she stopped tracking. Writing on the website The Quantified Self, in April, she said self-tracking had become an instrument of self-torture. ''I had stopped trusting myself, letting the numbers drown out my intuition, my instincts.''

Professor Bob Montgomery, president of the Australian Psychological Society, says self-tracking becomes a problem only when it interferes with someone's ability to lead a healthy, happy life, or negatively affects the people around them. Some self-monitoring can help people stop smoking, for example, by identifying the triggers of such behaviour.

He suspects many self-trackers try to reduce anxiety by using data to give them a sense of feeling they are in control over the randomness of life.

He rejects suggestions we are becoming more self-obsessed. People have long kept personal records or reckonings. But technology and social media have made such self-analysis more visible, he says.

''You probably spend most of your life trying to make sense of yourself. It is human nature to be interested in yourself and others.''

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