Quantifying My Life
It worked! While I was writing the little paragraph about
writer’s block, I remembered an interesting idea I had recently.
Last month, I created an excel spreadsheet that would tabulate how I
felt about my life every month. For starters, I decided I would
use a number between 1 and 10 for how things are going. I’ve long
suspected that a number like this would move in predictable
cycles. Unfortunately, my memory about overall feelings in a
given week or month are generally not reliable after a while, and I
don’t keep a diary. Hence, the idea of keeping a
spreadsheet. I think the ideal would be to go by days or weeks,
but that’s a pretty big task, so I’m sticking to months for now.
If I find any interesting results, I suppose it will become a new blog
entry in the future. It would be fun if more people participated
in this and we could actually compile a dataset…
Daniel
October 7, 2004 @ 1:57 pm
I was thinking of doing that about a year ago, and made a start but never carried on. I reckon it would be interesting, although do you think one entry per month will give enough ‘data’ to be worth bothering with? Weeks maybe.
david
October 12, 2004 @ 10:51 am
Somebody should create a little program that will ask you how you’re doing each day and record your answer. You could have this program upload its results to some central point. Then people could come and download spreadsheets and stuff of the collected data. This way you wouldn’t have to remember anything!
Phillip Lipscy
October 21, 2004 @ 10:33 pm
Yeah, I think months don’t really work that well. Maybe somebody should do a Comp Sci paper on it and turn it into a startup. Kind of like Google. I can actually imagine it being profitable. But then again, I can imagine a lot of things…
Gabriel
July 30, 2005 @ 3:26 pm
I think that emotional experiances are relative to circumstance and memory in a way that could be accuratly graphed. For instance, memory generally initiates the most common and effective emotional response based on similar past experiances, while circumstance serves as the condition and parameters of memory retreival.
Gabriel
July 30, 2005 @ 3:42 pm
Also, I beleive that the regularity of ones daily routines might corelate with the regularity of emotional experiance, and that those with the least structured and most random lifestyles would inevitably be subject to greater variation of experiance. There is also the issue of influence, which, depending on the suceptability of the experiancer corrals will, and initiates choice outside of memory. just some thoughts