Quantified Self

the dave diet

January 17, 2025 by Soulcruzer

Dave’s post took me back to my time in the quantified-self movement. I first got into it around 2016, exploring half a dozen apps designed to track different aspects of my life. Back then, it was often called lifelogging, and you could argue that blogging itself is a form of lifelogging.

Eventually, I lost interest in the movement when I realised I wasn’t actually doing anything with the data I collected—which, in hindsight, was the entire point of the quantified-self philosophy. But now, Dave’s little experiment might just rekindle my curiosity. With AI-driven apps, it’s probably easier than ever to track your life. You can simply tell the AI what you’re doing, eating, or drinking, and it will log everything for you automatically. Even better, AI could help me make sense of the data, turning it into actionable insights I can use for my self-improvement journey.

It may be worth revisiting the game.

Oh yeah, and this just reminded me of Jennifer Lyn Morone, who took the quantified self one step further and incorporated herself into a business so she could charge companies money to use her data, which, thanks to her incorporation, belonged to a corporate entity now known as Jennifer Lyn Morone, inc.

December 12, 2022 by Soulcruzer

I’ve dabbled in the quantified self movement on and off. If you’re not familiar with the “quantified self,” it’s basically a movement that focuses on using technology to collect data about one’s daily activities and behaviors. This often involves using wearable devices, such as fitness trackers, to track things like steps taken, calories burned, and quality of sleep. The idea is to use this data to gain insights into one’s own health and well-being, and to make more informed decisions about one’s daily activities and habits. Some people also use the quantified self movement to track other aspects of their lives, such as their work habits or personal relationships. The goal is to use data to better understand oneself and improve one’s overall quality of life.

I started the year off strong tracking everything – fitness, water intake, mood, books read, movies watched, TV shows watched, and sleep among a few other stats. I did good the first half of the year, but by July I was bored of it and so I topped tracking apart from what my Garmin watch tracks and Apple Health tracks without me having to do anything except wear the watch.

The stats I’m about to share with you as a part of my year-in-review are incomplete. I’ll start off with my most consistent stat which is my gym time. I use the My Gym Hero app to track my workouts.

Gym Stats

Walking and Cycling

This is definitely incomplete as I don’t turn on my Garmin tracker every time I go for a walk. I tend to record bigger walks or walks that are not one of my normal local walking routes. Same with cycling. I didn’t record my local rides. And has you can see, I’m summer cyclist!!

My Water Consumption

Haha! My blood is a mixture of coffee and water!

Mood and Activity Tracker

I used Daylio to track my mood and activities. I tracked diligently until I got bored with it. I do think, in the true spirit of the quantified self that this app very useful. You can also use it as journal to capture your thoughts and pictures. I only used it for the mood and activity tracker. Dayone is my got to journal!

The main thing I learned from tracking my mood and activities is that I am mostly in a good mood. Very rarely was I in sup optimal mood. It appears I don’t go to extremes. I’m not often overly excited, nor I am I sad or angry or any of those kinds of moods often. I’m just a middle of the road average happy guy I guess. Although it did raise some questions in my mind. Am I just not in touch with the full range of emotions that we are capable of as humans?

These are the main stats I tracked this year, at least the first half of the year. I think, to not get bored with the tracking, I need to embrace the movement correctly and have periodic check-ins and goals for each of the things I track and then correlate the data with how I feel health wise – mentally, physically, and emotionally.

I’ll add that to my list for 2023.

I’m a human hamster, that’s what life-logging taught me

December 27, 2016 by Soulcruzer

As some of you may or may not know, I started dabbling in the Quantified Self movement and tracking many of my activities throughout the course of a day. I ran the experiment for several months. My biggest take away was how much of a human hamster I am, and I suspect most of us are. That is, our lives on any given day is essentially interchangeably with any other day.

Same shit, different day comes to mind.

Yeah sure, there are nuances to any given day, and some days something totally out of left field happens, but mostly our days are the same.

Yeah, yeah even if you live a life of adventure, if you do it every day for enough days, it becomes the same. Trust me. I’ve spent many days out in the field and after a while one tree begins to look just like the next tree.

That isn’t necessarily to say that my life or your life is boring. It could be as exciting as Hell, but the sun will rise and the sun will set just the same. You will no doubt see most of the same people each day, drive the same car or catch the same bus, wear the same-ish clothes, eat the same-ish food etc.

There’s a sameness to our day that we can’t escape.

There I go again, getting sidetracked.

I’m suppose to be sharing some Quantified Self data with you. Particular the gym, because I kept up with the tracking after I finished the experiment .

Gym Hero Pro is my app of choice for tracking my weightlifting activity. I do believe you can connect it with RunKepper now for you running freaks.

I started using the app at the tail end of 2015, so the year on year improvement stats are not useful. I’m more interested in the 2016 tonnage and reps per exercises:

Tracking my gym activity was ok because I only had to do it once a day. The life-logging on the hand got a bit tedious tracking every thing. I think if I start again, which I might do come January 1st, I’ll only track those things that can be done with ‘always on’ technology and can happen in the background to what I do like my Garmin smartwatch does and apps like Moves or Momento (which pulls from your social media feeds).

Plus. I’ll continue to do some old school tracking in my journals.

Illuminate your life with these 7 Quantified Self and lifelogging apps

September 12, 2016 by Soulcruzer

This week we did a podcast on the Quantified Self and lifelogging, something I’ve been interested in ever since I read Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s book Total Recall: How the E-memory Revolution Will Change Everything. We’re in a place and time where documenting our lives has never been easier. Smart phones and ‘always on technology’ make it easy for us to document everything and with memory, both in the cloud and physically, getting cheaper, we don’t have to worry about running out space to store all the things we document.

In this post, I’ll share with you some of the apps I use to quantify myself. I talk about these on the podcast, but here’s a quick list for you to check out:

Optimized

Optimized is probably my favourite of the lifelogging and quantified self apps because you can track everything here. It comes already configured with four major categories – Health, Creativity, Routine, and Pleasure. There’s a ton sub-categories under each of these headings. Plus you can customise the app to track whatever like.

Optimized – Lifelogging and Quantified Self app helps you record your life to improve it. Simply track your everyday activities, places you visit, people you meet, your mood and many other things. Optimized automatically translates your lifelogging data into your personal insights: How does walking affect your sleep? How does your work influence your health? How do other people affect your mood? Optimized answers all of these and many more questions to provide you with decision support and motivation in your everyday life. Optimized respects your privacy – All your data stays locally inside the app.

Reporter

My next used app is Reporter. I like it because it randomly prompts you throughout your day to record what you’re doing at any given moment. This is cool because you get to see the frequency of what you’re tracking. Reporter is also customisable so you track what’s important to you. It’s not as colourful as Optimized and doesn’t track the duration, just the instance. But the random prompt is the selling point for me.

Reporter is an application for tracking the things you care about. With a few randomly timed surveys each day, Reporter can illuminate aspects of your life that might be otherwise unmeasurable.

Momento

The beauty of Memento as a lifelogging app is that in addition to your manual entries, it pulls from your social media feeds like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Swarm among others. You can use it as a dairy or daily journal. I mainly use it for the automatic collating of my social media feeds, plus taking a photo at the random prompts that happen throughout the day.

Introducing Momento — the smart private diary/journal app that helps you capture and collect memories to search, explore, relive and share your life story. Momento not helps you privately capture moments in just a few taps (with notes, photos, videos, people, places and tags).

Heart Rate Plus

I don’t have an Apple Watch yet, so to capture my heart rate data, I use Heart Rate Plus. I check my resting heart rate and occasional capture my heart rate after exercising.

Check your heart rate anytime, anywhere with Heart Rate Plus – at your home or your office – when you wake up, relax, before and after exercise, or before a big meeting. Bet you never thought your phone could do that? The Heart Rate Plus app will measure your heartbeat with great accuracy.

Activ8lives

I use Activ8lives to track my weight, BMI, BMR, Body Fat, Muscle %, Bone Mass, Visceral Fat, Water %. This app works in conjunction with the Body Analyser Bluetooth Smart Scales. Tracking your body composition is much better than tracking your body weight only.

Activ8rlives supports you in monitoring, maintenance and self-management of health, activity, weight and wellbeing. You can track and monitor a wider range of health parameters (steps, blood pressure, blood glucose, peak flow, oxygen saturation and temperature) and export them to Apple’s Health App.

Gym Hero Pro

I’m a gym rat. To track my weightlifting activity I use Gym Hero Pro. I like the depth of stats it allows you to track plus you can pre-schedule your workouts so you don’t have to spend time manually inputing everything in the heat of iron pumping. There’s also a social element, but I haven’t used this feature. Gym Hero Pro is app and web-based. I pay for the premium version of the app, but there is a free version. You get less stats, which is fine unless you’re gym freak like me.

Track workouts and boost your progress with Gym Hero Pro! Now with Apple Health Kit support! No more getting lost in long lists of workouts and exercises! Log your routines and keep track of your progress. Select sets, weight and repetitions in seconds.

Connect

My wearable fitness tracker of choice is the Garmin Vivoactive GPS Smart Watch. I’ve been using the Vivoactive for over a year now. I bought it as an alternative to buying the Apple Watch because I was primarily interested in the fitness tracking functions. Reading my texts and emails on my watch was secondary. The Garmin does mirror your smart devices notifications so if that’s your thing you will be able to read a snippet of your email, texts, tweets, Facebook messages etc. You can view all your tracked activity via the Garmin Connect app which synchs with watch via Bluetooth.

Meeting goals made easier: The newest version of Garmin Connect Mobile is designed to help you to focus even more clearly on your fitness and healthy living goals. All the data you rely on is easy to find and access on the app.

So why bother with all of this tracking? It’s twofold for me. One I think it’s a robust way of documenting your life. Think of it as a mega version of the old school diary/journal. Imagine what it would mean to your future grand kids and their kids, especially when you add in audio and video lifelogging. You’re essentially creating the museum of YOU for future generations to experience.

The second reason for quantified self and lifelogging is to highlight areas of your life that might be out of balance and need addressing and the objective data you collect will be able to highlight these areas to you so you can do something about it.

Ok so those are my reasons, over to you.

I’d be interested to know which quantified self and lifelogging apps you use. Let me know in the comments. Would also love to hear your thoughts on lifelogging and quantified self in general.