The idea of continually striving to be better and enhance every single aspect of our life is normal for people with a growth mindset. Always eager to be better. always seeking to improve, measuring their failures as step stones to success. Expanding their personal and professional contexts beyond comfort zones. Widening beyond their usual capacity of happiness and success.
They literally thrive.
But how do we measure this journey of continuous thriving?
Other than being extremely self-aware, it still requires a great deal of self reflection on our own behaviours, to be able to adjust and tweak what works and what doesn't for us.
The process of self experimenting where you question, design and observe your own self is essential to some degree for every one of us. We all have our different goals, life or work priorities, and have one way or another tracked or measured and participated in self tracking.
How further do we expand our tracking ourselves project is a personal option.
Some people take it a little extra notch where you can have spreadsheets and meticulously design and measure different variables and outcomes out of your life.
If you feel you are a person who loves experimenting and need this type of clear data measured and visualized to allow you to explore yourself and have more insights, you are defiantly not alone. And it is clearly beneficial to have some sort of self experimentation.
The type of questioning, amount of data, duration of experimenting really depends on how keen you are into this.
We all want to improve ourselves. And if you are tracking some aspect of your life, chances are .. you're either looking to implement a good habit or eliminate a bad habit.
My answer to myself? .. it takes a life time.
I truly believe that non of us are inherently good, smart or talented. We are a sum of our behaviours. We are a continuous work in progress.
Our life is a representation of a life-long summative collection of these efforts.
So really it is how much effort you put into building the habit.
Once you stop putting the effort, the habit naturally will stop.
I feel that this type of realization helps to liberate our mind to focus on doing the effort and the hard work.
Now, how can self experimenting help us build good habits and does it really work?
This bring to mind the famous saying by Henry Ford:
Whether you think you can or you can't, you're right.
It really needs tremendous amount of self-discipline, and an itching crave to get better.
This infinite dissatisfaction can be fueled by this continuous self experimenting life-time project. As you continue to learn and gain insight about yourself, the more you question and observe, the more you understand and realize.
This concept is clearly visualized in the Quantify self community. Where they help you find your questions, define and analyze the data you want to collect and most importantly, make sense of this data you are collecting about yourself.
Whether you agree on the self quantification concept or disagree, It is difficult to deny that some self-tracking data can help us gain significant insights, just as in any scientific experiment, where you observe, analyze your data, and adjust your variables to the desired out come.
That's why many people like wearing the tracking wearables (Apple watch, fitbit, Garmin etc)
Tracking your habits or activity, which most people does already .. if not structured in an organized way, and have clear goals and perspectives to gain insight, is just as is .. collected data!
Raw data have no meaning, and have no purpose. It's almost useless to put any effort collecting it, if we don't clearly know why and what we want to do with it.
Ourselves being the most important type of experiment, it is important that we spend enough time defining the right type of question and the desired outcome for us.
This process might seem daunting, but to start articulating this I made this simplified thinking process for myself.
Define the area you want to collect data for:
Physical Activity
Sleep
Productivity
Meditation
Nutrition
Growth
Define the question you are wondering about:
What is the best sleeping approach to take prior to the night shift?
Define the Outcome you are looking for:
Be as much awake, refreshed, and alert before a night shift.
Find what are the realistic variables you can change that affect this outcome you are aspiring to achieve:
take 2 hours nap before the night shift?
Sleep late till mid day before the night shift?
Define what you want to measure to assess achieving the desired outcome:
This is where data collection comes into place. It really depends on you how complicated or simple data you need to gain more knowledge and understand yourself better.
if you continued to consciously reflect on this data, it will give you great insight and deep knowledge about yourself in a much broadened way. And this is why it is very useful to spend sometime on self tracking the right data.
The last important point is, which is highly interrelated with the previous one, is how you plan to collect this data:
you can do it using a pen and paper, or using excel spreadsheets. but luckily there are easier softwares and gadgets to help you automate this process and make it less of a hassle.
for myself I depend heavily on 3 main tools:
Of course, it is not necessary to follow the exact tools I am using. There are may tools to choose from, go with what ever suits your lifestyle and preference.
For the above example, where I'm looking to collect data on my sleeping habits.
I used to use my apple watch, but it was very limiting mainly because of the battery life, inconvenient to sleep wearing the watch, and limited data tracking.
The apple health only targets normal sleep routines, where you go to bed and wake up on fixed times on weekdays and weekends. (which is not the case with shift workers)
So I use Oura ring, because:
It is light weight, I can sleep and forget i'm wearing it.
Have an awesome battery life. It averages from 5 - 7 days before recharge.
It is much more accurate and specific on measuring Heart rate variability and sleep stages.
My experience with Oura ring team have only been positive. at one point, it stopped charging after few months of use. After contacting them and determining it was a firmware issue, they sent me a replacement ring immediately at no additional cost.
I Also contacted them about my shift work issue, as it wasn't very accurate in detecting sleep out side the window of 6pm - 6am.
and sure enough, couple of weeks after, they added the Nap detection, where any sleep above 15 minutes during the day is detected and analyzed.
This is an example of the trends you get over time, without putting any effort really, you mainly need to keep wearing it and syncing the ring to your phone every now and then.
By collecting and analyzing this sleep data along with my activity monitor from apple health, I've reached few realizations that represents my own personal life style.
My total sleep averages in the range of 6 hours, which results naturally in low total deep sleep duration as well.
I get much more energy during the night shift if I took a 2 hour nap immediately before the shift. So I try to maintain my routine waking up early in the day when ever I can.
It is very important to respect your circadian rhythm. My energy and mood level plummets usually when I work few night shifts in a row without properly being exposed to day light.
My energy drops with certain types of food, and with the right diet I can at-least avoid it when I maximally need this energy.
Over the years, I have found it to be super helpful to be able to observe and gain new insight about your own self, and thus I feel that self tracking is absolutely essential for everyone.
But despite it's importance, we shouldn't take those numbers to the extreme. As humans we have memories, emotions and far more intelligence beyond this data. But with the right insight .. this numbers and data can supercharge many aspects of our life, because every one of us is unique, and no one formula will work for two individuals equally the same .. and thats what makes us humans.
Further reading:
useful tools:
Quantified mind (Measure cognitive and mental performance)
Rescue Time ( Measure Your productivity)
Welltory (All in one personal tracker, worth checking out)
Session (productivity tracker and Pomodoro timer)
Oura Ring (Sleep and activity)
Sleep Cycle (Sleep)
Carb manager (Diet and keto calorie tracker)
Window (intermittent fasting tracker)
Fitiv (Fitness and health tracker)
Garmin (if you need a specific more advanced fitness tracker, this is the one)
Muse ( A must have for meditation)
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