Self-Tracking: Tool to Focus on Self-Improvement!

 

More and more technologies aim to monitor the data we produce in our daily lives: what and how much we eat, how fast and how long we run, what times of day we work best. But how we (and others) utilise the data gathered through our self-tracking is a question that blurs the lines between surveillance/empowerment and control/play.

Health Sector, Social Networking

Self-tracking devices point to a future in which individuals will be more involved in the management of their health and will generate data that will benefit clinical decision making and research. They have thus attracted enthusiasm from medical and public health professionals as key players in the move toward participatory and personalised healthcare.

In less than a decade, a steady stream of new smartphone applications and wearable mobile sensors that allow users to monitor sleep, food intake, exercise, blood sugar, mood, and a host of other physiological states and behaviours has permeated the consumer health landscape, bearing the promise of cheaper, better, and more efficient healthcare. Self-tracking devices point to a future in which individuals will be more involved in the management of their own health and will generate health information that will benefit clinical decision making and research.

As one enthusiast has put it, “the paradigm of the old thinking ‘My health is the responsibility of my physician’, [is] being replaced by the new thinking that ‘My health is my responsibility, and I have the tools to manage it’”.

An abundance of products are now available that help people track their health, which is a smart new business idea. One example is the Withings WiFi Scale, which can automatically send weigh-ins to Twitter or Facebook. Or the Zeo, which senses brainwaves and coaches users online to improve sleep quality.

Fitbit and BodyMedia FIT also measure sleep quality but use motion and other sensors to track activity and estimated calories burned and consumed.

A beta version of the Basis watch is getting some buzz in QS circles because it measures the typical health variables but also tracks Galvanic skin response, an indication of exercise intensity. Users can share metrics collected by the watch on social media platforms like Facebook.

Speaking of social media, self-tracking is also becoming a big part of that market. Users on Quantter, a self-tracking site, broadcast things like how far they've run using simple hashtags on Twitter (e.g., they look like this: #run:3 miles).

Another example is Health Month, an online game in which you choose rules to follow for a month, such as limiting alcohol consumption or exercising a certain number of days a week. You can play on teams with people you know, or with the thousands of strangers who participate in the game. If you lose "life points" for not following the rules you can "plea for fruit" from other players and get them back.

Alex Rainert, whose title is "head of product" at Foursquare, the popular location-based service based in New York City, plays Health Month with 25 of his coworkers.

He says that since getting enough sleep can be a problem when you work at a start-up, he has a rule about getting seven hours of sleep, which sometimes conflicts with a different rule to exercise.

"I could get the seven-hour sleep rule and go back to sleep or I could get up, go to the gym and knock the gym off the list," he says. "That's what makes these apps interesting, that they are very directly influencing the decisions that you make."

 

How Self-Tracking Can Benefit Business

What if you could track everything you do in life? That is the idea behind self-tracking, a new method of tracking daily tasks, whether by using a health monitoring product, gauging employee productivity, or just finding out if your workers are happy.

Many CEOs spends anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours each day tracking everything they do in their jobs. Their goal: to figure out how to be more productive.

Importing data from Google Analytics into Excel spreadsheets, people can keep track of their productivity by logging how much time you spend completing programming tasks and resolving issues. People also want to track time spent in meetings, cooking, eating, exercising and sleeping. Even in relationships people want to keep track of who did what chores and which behaviors caused fights.

Those who are motivated by continual self improvement tend to use metrics to help achieve that. If someone has a goal to increase productivity 50 percent this year, then that person need a way to measure his/her productivity.

Adherents to the QS tend to believe that by using the plethora of gadgets, smartphones, and applications available, people can quantify their lives and make adjustments in behavior, if needed, resulting in a higher quality of life.

Personal self-tracking is just the start. The field could easily expand into employee productivity tracking and even tracking whether workers are truly happy on the job. And, self-tracking has spawned some new start-ups meant to help people track their behavior and daily health.

 

Introducing wearable devices can potentially be a game changer in creating happy, healthy and engaged employees.

Enlisting employees as brand ambassadors is recognisably critical to an organisation's success. It is employees who have primary contact with customers and key stakeholders, and it is important those contacts are positive.

Organisations increasingly long to build healthier, more mindful, and more productive teams, and employ wearable technologies (e.g., Fitbit) and self-tracking applications (e.g., Endomondo, Runtastic) to this end. Employees who participate in corporate wellness programs that encourage them to do more sports or to be more mindful feel more energetic and happier. Organisations also benefit as employees’ participation in such corporate wellness programs result in higher productivity, stronger corporate citizenship, and fewer costs associated with healthcare expenses.

Organisations tend to design corporate wellness programs around wearable devices and wearable technologies. For example, British Petroleum has a comprehensive wellness pro-gram that encourages employees to register their step count, earn points, and use them to win different rewards such as medical premiums and gift cards.

The notion of implementing wearables and self-tracking applications in an organisation is quite new. We have only begun to collect evidence of the effectiveness of wearables-driven CWPs. Findings suggest optimism and caution at the same time.

 

Positive effects of wearables

Some positive effects associated with using wearables in corporate wellness programs (CWPs) are:

Increased physical activity among employees. People who track their daily step count do indeed walk more and invest more time in fitness.

Improved subjective well-being of employees. Employees participating in CWPs feel better emotionally and physically and attribute this to the effects of participating in a CWP.

Stronger organisational community. Employees tend to discuss their participation experience with other colleagues, creating a buzz around a CWP.

 

Productivity enhancement

With bulging email accounts that demand purging and alluring social media sites that tempt employees with reprieves from work, it's no wonder many of us sit down at the computer and end up in a time-suck, avoiding real tasks. For those who lack the willpower to resist Facebook or for people frustrated with uncompleted to-do lists, self-tracking productivity tools can add time back into the work day.

For instance, StayFocusd is a free extension for Google Chrome that restricts the amount of time you spend browsing websites. When you've used up your Facebook time, for example, a screen pops up that says, "Shouldn't you be working?"

On a simpler level, WorkTime is a Windows app that tracks time spent on projects, documents and applications using a small window that sits on the corner of your computer screen. To start timing an activity, you just pick one a task from those you've defined and push the start button. To switch tasks, it's just a matter of choosing a different one from a drop-down menu.

 

Improving Happiness

Let's face it, happy employees do the best work. Some interesting tools are popping up to help people gauge mood and determine which factors influence behaviour.

British entrepreneur Jon Cousins created Moodscope, a social networking tool that tracks your mood, after he was diagnosed with Cyclothymia, a form of bipolar disorder.

"The usual treatments would be medication or psychotherapy, but I'd experienced the latter with little effect, and didn't want to take medication as it would likely dampen my highs -- the times when I do my best work," he said. Instead, he adapted a psychological mood test called PANAS into an online card game that asks players to rate themselves each day on 20 measures such as irritability, pride, and attentiveness.

In the workplace, an employee could use a tool like Moodscope (of their own choice) to see if they are happy in their job and to track their attentiveness level to work tasks. The employee then could report back to a boss and find out if the company can make any changes to help.

Ben Lopatin, a partner at Wellfire Interactive, a Web application and design firm based outside of Washington, D.C., says he has been experimenting with LifeUp!, an iPhone app for tracking daily tasks and moods.

"By tracking a correlation between certain tasks I define, like drinking at least two litres of water throughout the day or going for a run, and my general happiness level at the end of the day, I get a gentle but consistent reminder that those things affect my mood, which affects my productivity and focus," he said.

One thing is certain -- those who do self-tracking are hyper-focused on self-improvement, and that can only be a good thing for their overall health, work productivity, well-being.

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