[community] Tracking and recording, or choosing not to track and record

[Tirloni, Giovanni]

Hi Alan,

1. What kinds of things do you journal or track about your life?

Physical activity with a Fitbit wristband.
Websites/apps I use on my computer with RescueTime
Trying to use a to-do app on my phone/computer

They prompt me to exercise more, waste less time on useless things and organize my day. I find that being able to look back and see how I am doing with hard numbers provides motivation (versus only having a subjective feeling).

I really like the idea of tracking more of my self, but for my own benefit. Not a fan of sharing every single detail of that. I think this email is the most I've shared publicly in years :)

2. What kinds of tools (digital or analog) do you use to do so?

See above. Mostly digital. I thought about hanging some calendars on the wall to track days I have done certain activities to have better visual sense of them but never got around that. I think that will work better as a permanent and easy to see record of what I'm trying (rather than an app I open/close on my phone). It's bulky though.

3. What kinds of journaling or tracking have you tried and abandoned, and why?

Anything that requires active data collection on my part. Things like writing a journal of daily activities, things I ate (to rule out allergy triggers), water consumption, daily weight, time spent on projects. Nothing that required continuous conscious effort to capture lasted much longer (unless there were external forces pushing me to do it for a while). It's laziness combined with implicit benefit analysis.

Things that work automatically like Fitbit, RescueTime, etc have had better luck with me.

4. Are there things you have considered or wanted to track, but haven't? What kept/keeps you from doing so?

Manual data entry usually.

Water consumption: is there a glass that tracks that automatically? That'd help me.

Weight: there are some scales that can sync wirelessly but mine is a traditional one.

The drawback you can infer from all these laziness is that easy of use will rank higher than privacy concerns sometimes. For better or worse...

5. What kinds of things do you have strong feelings about not tracking, and why?

I am not super concerned about governments and corporations doing something nasty with my personal data at the individual level. I worry more how that affects society as a whole, where that will drive things to, etc. A dedicated attacker will always succeed against a victim with much less resources. If a state government decides Giovanni is import enough to merit close attention, they have the means to collect a lot of data without my help.

Society on the other hand is a bigger issue for me. Massive data collection is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper today. I'm not against lawful / targeted surveillance under circumstances defined by the law. The issue recent privacy scandals have shown are more related to the system being massively abused, in my opinion.

Things that make me not use a service/app: if it's not obvious I'm in control of making my data private. When there isn't a big switch that says "make everything past/future private now" that gives me pause.

If there is a way to export my data, that helps too in not being demotivated to track because I will lose the data later. Not related to privacy concerns though.

Overall, I think in the middle of the spectrum between "got nothing to hide" and "privacy advocate".

Giovanni



On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 1:03 PM -0300, "Harnum, Alan" <aharnum at ocadu.ca<mailto:aharnum at ocadu.ca>> wrote:

Hello inclusive design community,

Part of the Inclusive Design Research Centre's work on Preference Exploration and Self-Assessment (https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/%28Floe%29+Preference+Exploration+and+Self-Assessment) is revolving around metrics, journaling and other "self-tracking" activities. We're obviously interested in a wide variety of dimensions around this and thought we'd throw some questions out to the community…

So if you're comfortable sharing or otherwise have some thoughts along these lines, we're curious about questions like:

  1.  What kinds of things do you journal or track about your life?
  2.  What kinds of tools (digital or analog) do you use to do so?
  3.  What kinds of journaling or tracking have you tried and abandoned, and why?
  4.  Are there things you have considered or wanted to track, but haven't? What kept/keeps you from doing so?
  5.  What kinds of things do you have strong feelings about not tracking, and why?

I'll share one from my end to start off: I track my dreams, and have on and off for about fifteen years now. I record:

  1.  A basic description of what happened in the dream.
  2.  Basic type of dream: good, neutral, nightmare
  3.  Keywords for elements or themes that appear (especially if they're recurring ones) like:
     *   House I grew up in
     *   Failure in school
     *   Superheroes

I do this partly because I find it an interesting window into my unconscious mind but also because I have a number of friends who are also interested in their dreams, and we like to talk about them.

ALAN HARNUM
SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

E aharnum at ocadu.ca<mailto://aharnum@ocadu.ca>

OCAD UNIVERSITY
100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Canada, M5T 1W1
www.ocadu.ca<http://ocadu.ca/>
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