The numbers of everyday life

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 510 words - Tweet this

In many different ways, I adore statistics. Not in the highly mathematical and complicated sense that is really quite beyond me after a certain extent (although I say this without a drop of disdain, and only the utmost respect for those who call Mathematics their mistress). No, when I think statistics I think of huge banks of numbers realised in as many graphical forms as one could possibly desire. I think of Information is Beautiful. This website, for me, really does serve as the proof for it’s own masthead.

Collecting information, especially in the “raw data” sense of information accumulation in figures, is something I think is particularly interesting when applied to people – each of our daily lives. Each one of us does so many little, perhaps seeminly trivial, things every day that on their own, each day, don’t seem to matter at all. But we don’t live our lives for a day – our lives are an aggregate, and all of these trivialities which seem to mean so little each day can come alive when viewed as part of a greater context; the ‘big picture’, as it were.

For myself, it only takes a recollection of all of the various online gadgets I use (or I have tried out) to realise that I am already casually and informally trying to track a whole series of things. Which books I’ve read, where I go, what I’m listening to, what I read in articles and comment pieces – the list goes on, in websites like these, and my own personal attempts to realise and remember what I’m doing.

A while ago now, I had the idea to formalise this process – I wanted to know how many Red Bulls I was drinking; how much I was spending on them; and when I was drinking it. These questions in themselves are now defunct and irrelevant: I haven’t drunk Red Bull in three months (although in terms of statistics, this is twelve weeks at £1.09 per day, so 12x7x1.09 = £91.56 saved!)

However – even despite this severe drop in daily caffeine levels – I am still very interested in attempting to comprehensively track a series of different things about my daily life, which I believe (and hope!) have the potential to become very interesting as the amount of data I have increases.

A new year seems like a good time to start this kind of thing, but I’ll need some time to think through everything I’ll want to include before January, alongside a way to adequately visualise this information online in both ‘real-time’ and over longer blocks of time.

As far as the things I’d want to measure is concerned, so far I’ve thought: drinks, total expenditure daily, public transport, reading, and driving. Each of these can be measured in more than one way, and I’ll need to think about that, too.

But for now, I want to know – what else do you think would be an interesting thing to track and measure? At the end of a year, what would be interesting figures to have accumulated?