Over three months, I tracked 15 variables about my life every day, recording my sleep, exercise and screen time, health complaints, spending, cultural consumption and social plans, and rating my mood and my work productivity out of 10.
Or is this explosion of self‑tracking simply narcissism redesigned for the age of big data, by a society that has internalised the tech industry maxim that more data is always better?.
He even started to record, on a scale of one to eight, how much cheese he had eaten that day (it’s worth pointing out here that Adam is French – I can only imagine the carnage of a day that notches up the maximum eight out of eight on the cheese scale).
I mostly used a spreadsheet and my phone to record data, though I also included an Oura smart ring (which records sleep, heart rate, temperature and activity) in the mix halfway through the project.
Today an average smartphone has a host of self‑tracking tools built in – the iPhone Health function can help you keep track of your mood, mobility and nutrition, but also sexual activity, toothbrushing and time spent in daylight.
