My Life In 40 Variables

Project Infobox
Self researcher(s)	Justin Timmer
Related tools	scale, Tab Log
Related topics	Stress, Sleep, Heart rate, Temperature, Activity tracking, Food tracking, Diet and weight loss, Social interactions, Mood and emotion, Productivity
Builds on project(s)
Has inspired	Projects (0)

Show and Tell Talk Infobox
Featured image
Date	2015/09/18
Event name	2015 QS Europe Conference
Slides	My-life-in-40-variables.pdf

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My Life In 40 Variables is a Show & Tell talk by Justin Timmer that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2015/09/18 and is about Stress, Sleep, Heart rate, Temperature, Activity tracking, Food tracking, Diet and weight loss, Social interactions, Mood and emotion, and Productivity.

Description

A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:

Justin Timmer has been tracking about 40 variables using apps and wearables since 2013. In this talk, he shares his findings from his data; how tracking himself raises his awareness of things, confronts him with facts and makes him investigate deeper. He also shares what learned about happiness, stress, his phone use, sleep, and many other life-lessons.

Video and transcript

https://vimeo.com/152595580

A transcript of this talk is below:

Justin Timmer “My Life In 40 Variables”

My talk is about my life in 40 variables, and I’ve been tracking almost a year, a lot of stuff and today I’m going to give you a quick peak in the findings I found in my data and what exactly did I analyze and what is good for you to know. Well this is me, I’m Justin Zimmer, QS-meetup organizer doing my thesis at the Quantified Self Institute. What did I do? I’ve been using my diaries. I have an evening diary and a morning diary, where I track a lot of data and I also used the information from Mybasis and my Base watch and I used scales as well. This is the information from my Base watch. So this is an average day, and I took up every day the average values with my heart rate, skin temperature, activity like steps. And during the night it also analyzed my sleep and this is the data you can see, so how many hours I slept, how good my sleep was in deep phases and light phases and I looked at together with my subjective sleep analysis, and I did that in Tab Log. Tab Log is an app where you can just add buttons. So I have an evening diary and a morning diary and just collected a lot of data. So what did I get? In my evening diary I did a lot of moods and mood tracking. So I projected what my day was how social I was during the day. And the morning diary is more an aggregation of how good my sleep was and what were the cause of that. So I tracked a lot of things with a rating of 1 to 10. It’s something to talk about because it’s a subjective scale, and this can be very different over the days. So it a subjective scale for me, so I am very much conscious about analyzing and how can I correlate and how can I express this in knowledge for myself. And analyze exactly what this means to me. Objective data was the Mybase on my watch data so you can see that Mybase tracks and I also tracked my weight, in the morning and the evening and eventuallyand I looked at the difference, and this is what I get eventually. I put it all into a database, an SPSS and I analyzed some of it and correlated and t-test and everything. So the first thing I want to show you is my evening diary, what does my life look like. This is a chart, a visualization of all there visualizations between what my mood states. So if there’s a green bar it relates to each other in a positive way. So more active I am, or more happy I am, or more social I am, and more healthy I feel. It’s just correlation not causation, and the red bars are the anti-correlation. And so I figured the red bars are more strong the relation is. So as you can see you have to give somethings up and be more active; I can be less productive. And now I wanted to show one of the finer what makes me happy. So this is a chart of my happiness over a year, and the first thing I find out you see some bars where it’s a little bit higher and well that’s the days that I’ve been on holiday. So it’s pretty good to know that I’m on holiday I’m happy. But I don’t really wanted that in my database because it was different from my normal life. So I extracted them and asked my computer well, what makes me happy and he says well you have to be healthy, just be active, have a good night sleep and don’t be stressed. And that’s pretty nice to know that actually what you suppose what you think will make you happy does make you happy. The second thing I found is that life is pretty much repetitive. So this is a normal week on average, and every Wednesday I go to work and eat a salad, so work is kind of related with salad. And that’s something you have to be very conscious of what are you tracking, what day is it, what does it do. So during the week life is pretty much repetitive and in months as well. The next thing I wanted to find out is what does sleep mean to me and what is the relation with how good I sleep during the year and what does it change. The first thing I found is that sleep doesn’t really effect my day, but days really affect my sleep. So if I have a happy day and I’m not very lonely I have a very good night’s sleep, but it was not much of a relation between if my day was good how much I slept during the evening. The second thing I found is I’ve had a girlfriend for a while now and I sleep better with her, and I think most people can relate to that, and you can also understand why it’s harder to get out of bed and my girlfriend would like to sleep longer. Second thing I use flight mode on my phone and I just sleep better with flight mode on and I actually think it works. I like it and maybe it’s something else that. The third thing is my weight. So I track my weight in the morning and I track my weight in the evening, and sometimes I gained one and a half kilos during the day, and sometimes I just lost one and a half kilos a day and I could not find what it is. So I related everything and the only thing I found is that my skin temperature, when it was lower I gained weight over a day, and when it was higher I lost weight during the day. And I didn’t even know, so I looked at the graphs and I thought, well I’ll find out and life is kind of dynamic. Over a year your life changes and the temperature changes, and as you can see, skin temperature gets higher when it’s summer. That sounds pretty logical and my weight also gained. But I thought I would put tit to the test and wear a lot of clothes and I found this. When I wear a lot of clothes I gained almost 600g and when I wore less clothes I only gained 300g. But that was kind of contradictive to my analysis. To make a conclusion that my life is very dynamic, inter-correlated and everything has something to do with each other. So I have to conclude that your life you have to have a holistic kind of thinking because your life is very interrelated. You can see that sleep effects your day, the day effects your sleep and weeks effect your days, and days effect your weeks as well.

So that’s it.

About the presenter

Justin Timmer gave this talk.