sacha chua living an awesome life

I’m curious about how much I use my cellphone, and for what purposes. Does it make sense to switch plans? What do the patterns tell me about how I communicate?

The Fido network website allows me to download a CSV of my usage, and I pulled in all the data available. In addition to the call data, I’ve been copying the summary data (daytime minutes, etc.) into another worksheet so that I can estimate how much I would pay with different cellphone plans. From there, I can come up with questions and neat graphs. I have summary data going back to Jan 2011, and I have detailed call data going back to March 2011. There’s a little fuzziness about dates because my billing cycle ends on the 11th of a month, but it should be fine for data analysis. In general, the month is the month of the bill.

How have my call patterns changed since I started my own business?

I took a vacation in May and October, which accounts for most of the dips in calls. I spend more time on incoming calls than on ongoing calls, as I prefer to send text or e-mail messages instead.

Am I on the phone a lot more now that I’m in business compared to when I was an employee?

This box and whisker plot shows that on average, I spend more time on the phone now that I’m in business. I’ve only been in business for five months and I’m comparing it with eight months of employee data, so it’s hard to tell if this pattern will continue. Still, it’s interesting to see the average shift. If you’re curious, I followed this tutorial on creating box and whisker plots in Microsoft Excel 2010.

What about text messages?

I send a lot of international text messages, mostly to my mom. =) I also send quite a few Canadian messages, mostly to Twitter. In May, we were in the Netherlands to attend Kathy’s wedding, so we coordinated plans through texting.

I haven’t been sending anything nearly like the 579 text messages that I sent in July 2006, though. Partly it’s because Canada is growing on me – some cellphone plans charge for incoming messages here (I know! Boggle), so I don’t want to inconvenience my friends. Partly it’s because I’ve been in introvertish mode. Partly it’s because I’m married and like spending most of my discretionary time with my husband, so I’m organizing fewer get-togethers and the like. (I’m also texting said husband less, because we can just talk to each other.)

When am I on the phone?

Travelling across timezones messes up my data, so I filtered this report to remove any calls while roaming networks. Most of my calls are during business hours. Some are after for a part-time project that I’ve been supporting, and there were a few late conference calls that I joined as well. Some late-night calls were about production issues – side-effect of taking on the system administration role in many of my projects!

On what days of the week am I on the phone?

I use my phone primarily for work, which is why you see so much more activity from Monday to Friday. I do get the occasional Saturday or Sunday call, sometimes about production issues that I need to look into. Thursday seems to have a lot of following-up-on-plans-for-the-weekend calls.

What do I want to do about this data?

I wanted to know if my cellphone plan is the right balance for me. After crunching the numbers, I’ve concluded that:

• among Fido plans, my plan is pretty decent
• Mobilicity is tempting, but reviews are mixed
• WIND Mobile is probably a good experiment; must decide whether I’d want unlimited data. Probably. I want unlimited battery life first! Ah, well…

Do I want to wait for a port-in credit promo (typically $100), take advantage of the current international texting promo, or wait for other kinds of promos? My expected annual value for international texting is $28.50 per year. I’ll probably get a lot of value from giving myself more permission to play with data. I think I’ll wait for the Samsung Galaxy S3, though, because the display looks promising and I want a phone that runs Ice Cream Sandwich.

I don’t mind waiting to see how things shake out. It’s nice to know I’m not missing out on any clearly superior choices, and to know what my triggers are for reevaluating my decision.

I track my time so that I can find out if I’m spending enough time on the things that matter. For example, I find it easy to get sucked into work because I enjoy programming, but if I spend too much time at work, then I might not spend enough time developing other interests or sleeping. I’m also curious about how much time it takes me to do things so that I can estimate tasks better. Since much of my work involves consulting, being able to bill time accurately helps as well.

Off-the-shelf apps like TimeRecording helped me get started quickly, and it was easy to use the CSV export to analyze my data. When I had developed the habit of tracking my time and decided that it was worth investing in further, I began building my own system. QuantifiedAwesome.com is a Rails application that lets me track time, clothes, library books, and a bunch of other things that I’m curious about. The offline mode doesn’t work right now, but the web-based interface makes tracking easy.

I’ve set up a hierarchy of categories that somewhat follow the OECD leisure time study so that I can compare my individual metrics with international ones. For example, I count writing as Discretionary – Writing and cleaning up as Unpaid Work – Tidy.

To track, I type a substring into a text field of my dashboard. For example, if I want to say that I’m starting to tidy up now, I type in tidy and press Enter. I can also update it from my phone. Autocomplete will suggest categories if I type in text and wait a little.

I can backdate entries, which comes in handy when I start doing something while away from my computer or phone. For example, if I want to say that I spent the last 40 minutes gardening, I can type in -40m garden. It also understands things like -2h social, or 5/31 7:30 routines.

If I spent the entire day away from the Internet or if I have quite a few timestamps to enter, I can use the batch mode. The batch mode lets me specify a date and entries of the form:

7:00 category1
8:00 category2
13:30 14:00 category3

Sometimes I need to make the system recalculate the ending timestamps and durations. I can do that by expanding the options for the records list and choosing Recalculate durations.

My system makes it easy to see weekly or monthly summaries, and I can review the records by category or by time as well.

So that’s how I’m currently tracking my time. I’d like to get the mobile interface working again so that I can quickly update it while on the go, or rig up import/export from apps like Time Recording or Tap Log Records so that I can use those instead. I also want to build more reports that can help me answer questions like:

• What do I spend my time on?
• How does that time fluctuate?
• Are there any gaps or oddities that might indicate that I’m missing an entry or I’ve encoded things incorrectly?

I also want to import my old data so that I can analyze it. When that settles down, perhaps I’ll add another layer of granularity too!

We decided to skip the community-supported agriculture program this season in order to try buying the vegetables ourselves. Without the commitment device of a box of vegetables turning up at our doorstep once every two weeks, would we still buy and eat the same amount of vegetables? For comparison, the CSA programs typically cost $25/week.

To analyze this, I delegated data-entry to a virtual assistant who typed in the line-item details from all our grocery receipts. Total time: 2:10 for a total cost of USD 1.38, so I gave him a bonus. I used VLOOKUP in Microsoft Excel to map the line items to descriptions and categories.

Anyway, here’s what the data says.

$78.48 on fruits and $7.77 on vegetables?  Yeah, we need to work on that. Partly it’s because we made large batches of lunches using the frozen vegetables in the fridge that we’d bought the other month, so that wasn’t counted in this month. I’ll track for a few more months, and we’ll keep trying to build the habit of eating more vegetables… =)

The combination that I use to write most of my blog posts (Emacs, Org Mode, and org2blog) automatically keeps track of the time that it takes me to write a post, making it easy to calculate my actual words per minute rate. I created a table with data from 32 of my previous posts, discarding posts that didn’t have any time data.

It turns out that my median is actually around 16 wpm when writing blog posts, far lower than the 110wpm that I clock during typing tests and the 180wpm that I speak at when excited. This accounts for thinking, writing, research, and editing. For example, this post has 388 words and was written in 23 minutes – a rate of around 16wpm (hah!), including a little bit of research but excluding the tabulation of data (which I did before starting the blog post).

I talk slower in my head when I’m writing than when I speak, testing the words out and trying to figure out where I’m going to go. There are a number of ways I can write faster. I can experiment with outlining more of my posts, like the way a list of blog ideas helps me sit down and write a lot without idling between thoughts. I can try out dictation using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my new headset, to see whether the shift from from writing to speaking also changes my baseline speed.

And then there’s accepting that I write a lot already, and decently quickly too, so I could focus on other improvements. Organizing or illustrating my notes, for example, or revising old posts.

This is good, though. I want to write and explore and share as much as I can. I think the bottleneck isn’t:

• having enough writing time
• being able to type fast enough
• knowing the tools well enough
• being able to express myself through words

The bottleneck is probably more about my own speed of understanding and learning. That’s an entirely different area of hacking – and it looks like there are ways to tweak that, too. The visualization and peg techniques from memory books will help me absorb and retain more. Experience will help me get better at making sense of what’s going on. I wonder how I can come up with comparable numbers.

How can you get started with Quantified Self? Don’t worry, you don’t have to build your own system or use fancy tools. You can start with pen and paper, and use a simple spreadsheet to analyze your data.

Even if you don’t start with a clear question, sometimes tracking data helps you see patterns. When you collect data, then you can change something in your life and see if it has any effect.

Here are some ideas:

• Track the time you go to bed, the time you woke up, and whether you felt tired after waking up.
• Track how many glasses of water you drink a day.
• Track how many steps you take each day. A pedometer makes this easier.
• Track the groceries you buy in one month. How much do you spend on different categories?
• Track the clothes you wear. Do you have a handful of favourites? Are there clothes you never use?

Give it a try and see what you discover!

Click on the image to view a larger version.

I weighed everything we received from Cooper’s Farm for this season’s community-supported agriculture program so that I could compare it with Plan B Organic Farms. The numbers always surprise me when I tally things up at the end. Did we really go through that many potatoes? Wow, we actually got more onions than cabbage. Sure didn’t feel that way.

Getting vegetables bi-weekly instead of weekly definitely helped stave off the “oh no I’m swimming in vegetables” feeling. Some food was still wasted, though. Some of the beets got mold before we could do stuff with them (they came moist) and the rutabaga and turnips stumped us. But we managed to plow through most of the vegetables.

We averaged 5.5kg per delivery, which was less than what we received with Plan B Organic Farms (see my fall analysis). That was a fall share, though, so winter/spring is understandably smaller in terms of the harvest. I opted for Cooper’s Farm because I thought the delivery might come in really handy during winter, but this winter was unusually mild, so I didn’t end up with as many “thank goodness I don’t have to trudge out for vegetables in the snow” moments as I thought I might have. That’s okay.

I wish someone else was keeping track of what the corresponding Plan B Organic Farms results were! Oh well. =)

This season, we’re going to skip the CSA and buy our vegetables ourselves. I want to see what that comes out to in terms of cost and whether we still get through as many vegetables without the forced commitment of a vegetable box. We’ll see!

Quantified Self Toronto is a lively meetup around self-tracking and life experimentation. I like the group, and I pick up lots of inspiration every time I go to one of the meetups. There’s one tonight (March 1, 7PM, 221 Yonge St. Toronto), and 48 people have said that they’re going. Neato!

I want to make it easier for people to share what they’re working on, learn from past meetings, and connect with each other. I spent the morning organizing my sketchnotes from past meetups. (Oddly enough, I don’t have any notes from even-numbered meetups…) I want to flesh this out with a directory of members’ profiles, maybe eventually building this into something like Think Try Learn or linking to people’s profiles there.

Anyway, here’s the start!

quantifiedawesome.com/toronto