The era of data is among us. The common term thrown around is big data for big corporations. However, I believe that small data has abundant potential applications for individuals. I refer to small data in the sense that it can be opened in a spreadsheet. It is not the size of the data set that matters, but the quality.
Our society has gathered tremendous amounts of data on individuals and there are numerous ways small data can improve your life. I use the term "personal analytics" to refer to utilizing data to harness individual insight. There are five separate domains in which personal analytics can be applied for enhance well-being.
1. Health and Fitness
People have already begun to use data to maximize the results they see versus the number of hours spent in the gym. However, utilizing personal analytics to improve health and fitness is still in its infancy. Imagine overlaying your workout history with a graph of your weight. You could visually see which workouts have more of a profound impact on weight loss.
Furthermore, personal analytics can be used to maximize each individual workout. For instance, imagine yourself documenting how much weight you are bench pressing and squatting. You reach the insight that you bench 20% more on Thursdays than on Mondays. Similarly, you realize that you squat 25% more on Mondays as opposed to Thursday. Then, you ask yourself, why you continue to bench on Mondays and squat on Thursdays as opposed to the opposite? This is one example out of a plethora of how analytics and data collection could enhance your health and fitness.
Soon, we will be able to measure other activities, such as sleep quality, calorie inbound and outbound, and even alcohol intake.
2. Work Productivity
Next, work productivity can be enhanced with the use of personal analytics. A simple correlation between output and input needs to be measured, documented, and analyzed. For instance, suppose you could rank the productivity on a Likert scale from 1-10 on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Then, if you could combine this knowledge with the duration you spent in meetings or sending email over the same duration. You would then begin to see extremely profound results in terms of discerning the ideal amount of hours to spend in meetings or emailing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
3. Social Life
Personal analytics to reassess your social life can have the largest implications, especially in our era of social media. Text messages, phone calls, social media, and an associated emotion with each can open the doors to improving your social life in a variety of directions. Envision what the world would be like if you could determine which friendships increase your self confidence and build you up and which "friendships" slowly deteriorate and demolish your outlook on life. You can re-shift which people you are giving your energy to in order to spend time around people that make you feel better. I will be looking forward to see how people apply personal analytics to measure and evaluate their social life in the near future.
4. Personal Finances
Using analytics and data for personal finances is an obvious one. Would it not be fantastic if you could save more money by eliminating frivolous purchases and increase spending in investments that will pay off in the future? The real power will come from combining analytics in the personal finance domain with any of the other domains listed. You could analyze how your personal spending on gym memberships affects your health, spending on your small business affects your bottom line, or even how spending on other people affects your relationship with them. Lets face it, there are people who you enjoy spotting a few extra bucks because you know they will return the favor and other people that you know just use and abuse your bank account.
5. Recreational Activities (esp. Sports)
Again, this is another obvious one, thanks to ESPN. Sports networks have decades of data and they have become immensely efficient over the past few years with conveying the insights to the public in near real-time. However, the subject of this post is personal analytics. How would you reevaluate your performance in your sport of choice if you had the same capabilities as ESPN. You could use this ability to determine where, on what day of the week, with which teammates, and under which circumstances you play best. The only hindrance is a methodology for capturing this data without hiring an entire team of sports analysts.
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