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LifeloggingI am Apollo Lemmon and this is my lifestream. I invite you to join me in my exploration of an integral life. I am focused on discovering what it means to live a life rooted in integral consciousness and I explore spirituality, art, community, technology, fitness and other aspects of a fully engaged life. I am now living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
I can always be reached at apollo@apollolemmon.com
Three months ago I was lifelogging every day and keeping a good record of my activities at Daytum. Around the time I moved back to Nova Scotia I fell out of the habit of recording my eating, sleeping, exercising and meditating activities. Since then I have allowed myself to neglect lifelogging during the transition involved in returning to Halifax. Now I am looking forward to beginning again on September 1st.
This time I will be trying an alternative to Daytum, the flashier and more social zeaLOG.
In very few words, zeaLOG is a site for keeping track of anything and everything. Users track things either publicly or privately, and can either go it alone, or work in groups to see how they stack up against other folks. Users are tracking exercise, weight, how often they fight with their mother, what movies they watch, their Coke Zero habits, even how often they have sex (those are usually private). Nothing works like peer pressure and encouragement. ~zeaLOG
We could all be more skillful at conducting effective change in our lives, and I’ll raise my own hand high if we’re going to count failures in change. Recently I’ve been learning from some fine examples of people working to change their lives and I’ll to pass along some of what has been valuable.
Self-experimentation is a very effective way to discover ways in which we can alter our lifestyles. Experimentation gives us objective data about how we are living and how well we are changing our lives. Without evidence, we can fool ourselves with wishful thinking or doubts about our progress, but we have the tools we need to confirm our practices are working and to shape them into more effective vehicles for change.
At Daytum.com/apollolemmon I track four aspects of my life. In the days since March 9th, I averaged 7.35 hours of sleep, 1.69 hours of exercise and 1 hour of meditation each day. The ten foods I consumed most were bananas, broccoli and feta salad, tabbouleh, Texas caviar, chili, vegetable samosas, falafel, soyeat, pita bread, and curry tofu soup.
This is a quick digest of my lifelogging data from Tuesday March 9, 2010 to Friday March 19, 2010.
Lifelogging provides an effective way to objectify pieces of our lives, and when it is used in the service of subjective practices like meditation it gets really juicy. Equanimity Project works at the convergence of the objective and subjective, providing tracking of meditation to aid in establishing a practice and overcoming resistance. The Equanimity application is currently available for the iPod Touch and iPhone, but the website also includes printable charts and a flash timer.
Easy to read graphics let you know at a glance how regularly you are meditating, and how long your daily practice has been going. A chart illustrates your progress over the course of the year, and a bar graph shows the total number of hours you have meditated.
It’s much easier to keep going with a routine when you can see so clearly how you are doing. ~ “Meditation timer for the iphone“
Gary Wolf featured Equanimity Project and its creator Robin Barooah at The Quantified Self blog today and shared the following video, in which Robin explains his application.
I’ve selected quantified, simplified and intimate as three words to be the framework of my 2010. These words will serve as guides for my projects throughout the coming year; if an endeavor does not serve to deepen any of these words I will consider not doing it. I came upon the idea in Chris Brogan’s own 3 Words for 2010.
Quantified
At the end of 2009 I began working more actively with the ideas of Total Recall and Quantified Self to track details about my life. By the end of the year I was keeping track of my diet, exercise, sleep and meditation daily and gaining some insights into my behaviours. The word quantified is to help me remember to add new ways of measuring my progress in building a better life. A concrete example of how this allows for goal setting is my plan to add one new area of subjective or objective tracking to my lifelogging each month; for January I had added mood tracking through the website Moodlog.
Simplified
At heart I’m a minimalist, even though I’ve had a lot of clutter and stuff in my life. This year my life will become further simplified through embracing ememory to reduce my possessions to little other than what I can work with digitally. My unnecessary and clunky furniture like desks and shelves will be purged soon as well. I plan to take on commitments only if they enrich my life in an important way. I’ll be adding in more simplification projects as the year flows along and I prepare for another move.
Intimate
In the past couple years many of my relationships have not been as strong and as warm as I aspire for them to be. There are many things that contributed to this, whether it was overextending myself in other activities, purely not communicating well and often, or not cultivating new friendships. I’ve been in a new province since September and have made no friends outside of work and I definitely want to change this trend. Throughout 2010 I’ll be developing a warmer presence, deeper and stronger ties with friends and just maybe finding a new romantic partner or two.
We have been benefitting from improved memory given by technology throughout history —the book is an obvious example of this— and have just entered an exciting new wave of memory enhancement that will enrich our lives and the lives of every generation to come. E-memory is coming of age and in its wake we’ll have freedom and ability that we’re only now beginning to recognize. Imagine a world where we can retain and recall any information or event with ease for the rest of our lives. It’s here, today.
We are on the cusp of an era in which, if you choose, you can create e-memories of everything, forget nothing, and keep them in your own personal archive. You can have what we refer to as Total Recall. Souvenirs and mementos will belong to another era. More and more is being recorded about each one of us than ever before, and it is bound increasingly to include reading habits, health, location, and computer usage. Archivists, who are already beginning to deal with digital curation, will have to grapple less with physical objects and more with the potential analysis and distribution of the information those objects represent. And library patrons will be a new breed, “a digital person,” with their own personal digital libraries of everything they’ve ever read, seen, and heard. ~“The E-Memory Revolution”
Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell, two highly respected researchers at Microsoft, released Total Recall in September and have inspired an increasing interest in e-memory. Their work promotes technology as a means to enhance human memory by freeing it from tedious work and enhancing it dispite our physical limitations. They offer an exciting, yet practical, roadmap of our future relationship with our memories.
E-memory —also known as lifelogging— is the digital storage of all kinds of data about our lives, from the intimate to the abstract, and “our magical new ability to find the information we want in the mountain of data that is our past”. Beyond this will be the ability to have computers analyze our data and reveal ways we can improve our lives. Imagine being able to correlate dietary changes and better performance at work or a new hobby and better health. The insights we will be able to gain about our unique life patterns will be endless and may well reshape society for the better.
It is becoming increasingly easy and affordable to record information about our lives: Bell has worn the SenseCam for years, having photos snapped for him throughout his day; Fitbit monitors activity level and quality of sleep; GPS cameras take photos and tag them with location and time information; sites like Daytum allow for easy manual tracking and visualization of life data; we already record our e-mails with services like Gmail; track our social life with Facebook and IM chat logs; and groups like The Quantified Self are creating new avenues of exploring lifelogging and e-memories. What is most exciting is that projects such as MyLifeBits are underway to make it easy for each of us to record, manage and use all this information. We are in the early years of a very exciting change in the way we relate to memory, but already it is shaping us.
We are being given the opportunity to retain more about our lives than ever before, and not just for ourselves. We will be able to leave wonderful records for generations to come that will allow all we have learned, sensed and done to be better preserved and re-experiened. One example Bell and Gemmell point out is the use of avatars. Imagine leaving such a detailed record of our lives that we can leave interactive guides for our grandchildren, with all the wisdom, warmth and uniqueness we can record. E-memories may be the seeds of this sort of invaluable breakthrough.
For more about e-memory, I can’t recommend Total Recall too highly. Aside from the book, there is a great Total Recall blog by Bell and Gemmell. There is a lot more to be said about this fantastic change and I’ll be writing more about it in the coming months.
The data we can collect from our lives is increasing exponentially and a new lifestyle of Lifelogging is emerging. Ubiquitous recordings of many individuals’ lives are being willfully created, archiving what they see, what they hear, how they move, their relationships, their biological indicators and countless other facets of their lives. While most of this is surface data, when it is combined with blogging and other interpretive records of experiences a robust model of a person could emerge.
The value of including lifelogging in our lives has potential to be immense. Medical use alone could improve our lives greatly, allowing doctors greater access to various symptoms of pathologies. Having an aid to our natural memory would be welcome, especially to those suffering memory loss. Parsing the data could even provide us with recommendations for where to eat, reminders of friends we have been neglecting and a host of other life-enhancing features. It’s a transhumanist dream becoming a reality.
But there are negative potentials in this emerging field. The line between the private and public spheres is already blurring, and details we may not want known could spread. As we record ourselves and others record us a certain level of dishonesty and unhealthy reserve could emerge as a protection against being outed as less perfect than we’d like the world to believe. Conversely, many of us may end up using lifelogging to prop up our notions of narrow identity, just as blogging does for so many.
And just what data is valuable to us? Our natural memory parses out information that our brains deem unnecessary and this certainly helps us in our daily lives. When we can record information our brains would normally discard, how do we filter out what is useful at any given time? Much like the with internet as a whole, the navigation and organization of our life data is going to be critical in making lifelogging a seamless tool.
If we can cultivate transparency and use this technology to examine our lives well, this could be a great leap in our understanding of our selves. We could hope that it even allows us to step back and look at all we can objectify about what we think of as ourselves. Our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, all of the things we identify with are objects arising in our Self. And objects always change. We will see a record of changing objects and nothing more. We can keep pealing back the onion layers of our identities but we are always, first, foremost, and in essence, awareness. And awareness sees but is never seen.