Measurements

One thing I've learned over the years is that I can't trust myself. We humans tend to be absolutely terrible at many things. Our yearning for causality and stories leads us to make conclusions which actually don't hold true under closer inspection. We are influenced by feelings of fear and greed and often succumb to hubris. So it's no wonder why it seems that the life of a typical person is very much a tragicomedy.

To tackle the above, I've been trying to impose some structure in my life via quick and easy exercises. In a separate blog I'm documenting the year of my life from a daily financial perspective: how do I spend money, are there any easily observable trends, and so on. In HeiaHeia I try to track my exercises. And recently Google Docs Spreadsheets combined with forms and linked to the home screen of my iPhone provides me with an easy, quick, and flexible framework to start tracking anything with relative ease. The point here is that gathering data is critical to be able to do any type of educated decisions. Having a hypothesis about what to change to improve a bit in your life is fine, but if you don't have any way to judge whether or not the results materialize and are what you wanted, it's relatively pointless to invest any effort into change.

On the other hand, gathering raw data and analyzing it also motivates you by giving very concrete and quick feedback with which to evaluate how you're moving along. Measuring the times of standardized jogging routes enables you to see how much faster you're able to run. Add a subjective measurement of how the exercise felt and you can start analyzing on a rough level what your strong points are and what are the potential shortcomings when running training for a half-marathon. Or tracking your spending enables you to find things such as how much money you spend on pointless things or in bars and how rigorous financial discipline is useless if you go splurge on an individual day every once in a while.

I guess ultimately this entry is merely a personal note to remind myself again that everything can be measured and just about everything should be measured. And once you start measuring things, you can start improving them. And that's good since at least for me happiness correlates relatively strongly with change achieved in a certain timeframe.