Quantified Self

Today was my boss's last day. That's his head over by the skull on the wall. I thought he'd left already, but then I heard the tell-tale thwack, thwack, thwack of the tennis ball that, to be honest, has made me want to slam my head into the wall more than once in the past. Now I'm going to miss it.

But he's on to greener pastures. Don't mind the crazy eyeballs -- that's a remnant of a day when my team was excessively tired and burnt out, and I couldn't do much about it. 

I decided this week to track my happiness level every day. There's a side to me that gets some kind of strange joy out of putting charts and stats to stuff -- the more ridiculous, the better. That's why when I used to have an analyst on my team we ended up keeping a spreadsheet of M&M data and asking ourselves questions like, "How many Nilla Wafers would it take to fill up my office?"(Answer: 459,526 cookies at a cost of $25,469, if you're buying 2,027 of these boxes)*

I was telling the same analyst about my happiness tracking today and how I built a rubric to keep my happiness ratings objective, and he drew this bell curve for me that's supposed to show what my happiness would look like if normalized. 

I don't really even know what that means, except that if all things were stable and you discount any aberrations / eliminate any messiness, my happiness levels should fall between a 3.83 and a 7.1 68% of the time. We'll see. So far they've fallen in that range 60% of the time, but I only have 5 data points. I'm using a site called askmeevery.com, which sends me a daily text asking, "How happy are you?" I'm finding it highly entertaining.

Michael was reading an article the other day that called this kind of thing -- putting numbers to elements of your life like happiness, or fitness, or productivity -- "the quantified self." It may be the big thing now with apps and tools like Fitbit, but it's not a new idea. Really it just makes me think of Ben Franklin's Autobiography, where he decided he was going to rate himself daily on certain traits and try to improve each. I like Ben Franklin. He also liked to write naked so he could let the air circulate around his private parts. You're welcome. 

*P.S. I didn't force him to do these kinds of things. It wasn't like, "Tell me how many cookies, slave!" I'm not some kind of crazy boss.