Thanks RescueTime!
When I sit down with business clients, we typically start by identifying the key performance indicators that will cover all of the core areas of their business. There might be a few KPIs to measure customer service, a few to measure production, a few to measure finance, a few to measure human resources, and a few to measure the supply chain. What would happen if we take the same approach to our lives? What would be the 4 or 5 key areas of your life? How could we measure indicatiors of how you are doing in those aspect?
It is something I have been thinking about for a couple of years, and the thought is growing.
There is a growing movement around the idea of a quantified self. It is a very broad category that includes everything from fitness trackers like FitBit and RunKeeper, health tracking devices like Withings, productivity tool RescueTime and many more. It also includes the neckbeards of the Quantified Self movement who strive to find correlations between the number of bananas that they eat in a week in relation to their overall happiness as determined by the sentiment analysis of their social media streams. (Ok, maybe no one is doing that one yet, but eventually someone will.)
What would it look like if we took the same approach to our lives that we do in our businesses? What would be the 3-5 core areas of my life? I imagine it would be something like: Health/Fitness, Relationships, Finances, Work, Recreation.
That is what the goal of “quantified self” is for me. Right now I have a hodge-podge set of tools that mostly focus on Fitness and Work with a little on Finances. How can I set goals in each of those areas so that I live the life I want to live? How can I track performance on those goals?
This is something I am passionate about and would like to work on one day.
Previous thoughts: A post on Life Tracking.
Businesses may not publicly share their real-time metrics. However, they will likely share their milestones. People are like this too, some more open than others.
When I think about the services you mentioned, I often think about the idea of “fat blogging”. This is where people publicly share every step of their effort to lose weight.
Joseph Jaffe and Robert Scoble are two people who pop in to my head regarding fat blogging. I did it too when I started running and became a sober vegan in an effort to reduce my cholesterol.
I’m not sure how I feel about businesses sharing their real-time data with the world, but I love doing it personally. Every time my Ease Into 5K app posts my run summary to Facebook and Twitter automatically, I get a few replies and comments that are all encouraging.
It’s our community support who help push us in the right direction, much like the early fat bloggers commentors did. As we all open up more, by sharing more across social platforms, I expect many more people will also share their personal goals with the world.
I’m currently adopting the metrics I use for client SEO monitoring, its a sparser more self explanatory list