A few nights ago, I came to the realization that I wasn’t really reaping the full benefits of the quantified self part of the quantified self + commitment contracts Beeminder equation. I could barely even answer the question “what books have I read in the past year” without flipping through 15 screens of data points.
A little background about my reading goal is in order: it’s an odometer goal set at 20 pages/day; when I start a new book, I write the title of that book in the comment (otherwise I leave it blank).
To get more insight into my reading, I decided to switch the comments from titles to ISBN numbers, then combine the Beeminder API, Google Books API, and D3 to get a nice picture of what I’ve read.
The outcome lives here:
http://www.althack.org/reading.html
Some things I’ve realized from this view:
- Wow, those 1 week lapses when I derail really add up; usually I need a break if I’m derailing, but I doubt I really ever need an entire week.
- I really only get ~20 books / year at my reading rate; I should be much more careful what I choose to read – the selection process has been fairly haphazard so far.
- I seem to only derail on technical/dry/math books.
- This graph looks way cooler when I read every day.
Taking a look at the data for this goal has been pretty valuable for me, and I hope it was an interesting read for you. I recommend others consider doing the same with their data-rich & important goals.