the paradox of data collection and living simply
Generally, I recommend eliminating things from your life in order to simplify. However, there is a slight problem with that piece of advice. I love data. I love collecting it. I love analyzing it. For example I currently keep track of or have kept track of in the past; everything I eat, every cent I spend, how many miles per gallon I’ve gotten on every tank of gas since early 2008, the price per mile I have driven since early 2008, how much I sleep every night, how I spend every minute of leisure time, how many miles I have run, how many pushups I have done and countless other random activities. How can I reconcile my lust for numbers with a simple lifestyle?
The first thing I learned is to only track what I really need to know. While it was kind of cool to know how I spent every minute of my leisure time or how much I was sleeping every night, I decided to stop tracking those aspects of my life. Steve Pavlina recommends keeping a time-log to identify where your time is spent if you are trying to improve your productivity. That is good advice, but I don’t recommend doing it for any longer than a week. Now, I only track information that I actively use and analyze. I used to track every single calorie that entered my mouth over the course of the day. I quickly found that this started to be impractical so now I only roughly keep track of the servings of food that I eat. This leads me to my second point.
I have to make collecting the data as easy as possible. If I have to jump through a lot of hoops to keep track of something, more than likely I will stop doing it. I use a simple spreadsheet to track my spending and I have been doing it for so long it is now second nature for me to save my receipts. For most situations, I would recommend using the simplest tool you can to achieve your ultimate goal. Most of the time, that is probably going to be a spreadsheet or text file. However, I have started using a piece of online software called daytum to track most of my data. Daytum makes it very easy to input all sorts of information and tag it with relevant information. The best part of this service is that you can then use your data to make all sorts of interesting graphs and charts.
Lastly, the easiest way of all to keep track of something is to make it automatic. I really enjoy knowing what I have listened to and the service last.fm makes tracking my listening habits super easy. The program just runs in the background and sends all my listening info to a centralized location where I can then look at all my data. The nice thing about last.fm, and I will write more about this soon, is that it is allowing me to simplify the way in which I download and store music.
Collecting data on various aspects of your life can help create the motivation to change your lifestyle. Don’t let tracking your food intake or how much exercise you do become complicated and you can still keep your life simple while indulging in your taste for numbers.
Photo by lustfish
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