It is a nat­ural desire to strive for self-improvement and seek knowl­edge about one­self, but until recently it has been dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to do so objec­tively and quantitatively.

Now, through self-tracking sys­tems and appli­ca­tions that are becom­ing preva­lent in many of our lives thanks to a num­ber of tech­no­log­i­cal advances and soci­o­log­i­cal changes, we can, at last, find the answers to ques­tions that were once beyond us.

That is the essence of Gary Wolf’s com­pre­hen­sive study of the self-tracking phe­nom­e­non, look­ing at how we are head­ing toward ‘the quan­ti­fied self’ and a ‘data-driven life’… and what this means.

When the famil­iar pen-and-paper meth­ods of self-analysis are enhanced by sen­sors that mon­i­tor our behav­ior auto­mat­i­cally, the process of self-tracking becomes both more allur­ing and more mean­ing­ful. Auto­mated sen­sors do more than give us facts; they also remind us that our ordi­nary behav­ior con­tains obscure quan­ti­ta­tive sig­nals that can be used to inform our behav­ior, once we learn to read them. […]

The goal isn’t to fig­ure out some­thing about human beings gen­er­ally but to dis­cover some­thing about your­self. Their valid­ity may be nar­row, but it is beau­ti­fully rel­e­vant. Gen­er­ally, when we try to change, we sim­ply thrash about: we impro­vise, guess, for­get our results or change the con­di­tions with­out even notic­ing the results. Errors are pos­si­ble in self-tracking and self-experiment, of course. It is easy to mis­take a tran­sient effect for a per­ma­nent one, or miss some hid­den fac­tor that is influ­enc­ing your data and con­found­ing your con­clu­sions. But once you start gath­er­ing data, record­ing the dates, tog­gling the con­di­tions back and forth while keep­ing care­ful records of the out­come, you gain a tremen­dous advan­tage over the nor­mal human prac­tice of mak­ing no valid effort whatsoever.

via @vaughanbell