Holy moly! This month I've slept 285 hours. So what?
Heck! You took a hell of a lot of steps lately, you should pace yourself man, you don't wanna wear out those heels, now, do you?
Is that what you had in mind when you decided this was really the best way to spend your precious time?
Presuppose that you believe there is value in doing more, or less, of certain things. And that you have a way to measure the amount of those things that you do, either manually or via some passive monitor. Quantification can help you in your efforts to change your behaviours by making them measurable and less subject to the vagaries of bias and memory failure.
For example, if you felt that it was a total waste of your time and energy to write snarky comments on the interweb which appear to be written from a place of intentional ignorance, you could wire a monitor up to your downvotes and over time aim to minimize your negativity by making an effort to think about ideas from multiple perspectives, or by doing some background reading to cure yourself of the "confusing to me" == "stupid" virus.
A more common use might be "how many miles have I run this week?" "Do I have more productive days after running, or after a good sleep, or both?". Unlike the "don't be a jerk unnecessarily" monitor, these are more informative when you can look at lots of data, because the causes and effects are more complicated and often intertwined.
The biggest problem with all these QS apps & wearables is it gives me TONS of really beautiful, useless data.
There's no action steps:
- no "you sleep optimally when going to bed at X and waking up at Y"
- no "you need to walk 15,000 steps for the next two months to hit your weight loss goal.
QS is a start - but there needs to be some sort of data interpretation for this stuff to be useful.
One reason for this is that the human body is too complex (and the data too incomplete) for simplistic advice like "walk x steps per day to reach weight y".
You're also unlikely to discover a novel correlation that can be used to lose weight (and write a book and get rich)... But what you can do is use your data to determine which known solutions are working for you, and which are not (e.g. do I really sleep better when going to bed before midnight, all else being equal?).
I'm eager to see how exist.io handles all of this! (I run another service in this space, zenobase.com)