Tag: Self Surveillance

backTrack Personal Travel Log for Android

I used to carry a GPS logger to keep track of where I’d been, but that tended to be expensive when I’d lose or run over the loggers, and the data wasn’t necessarily in a format where I could easily use it. There are GPS loggers for Android, but none of them worked very well for my purposes, so I stopped tracking my location for awhile.

A few weeks ago, however, I discovered backTrack Personal Travel Log for Android. backTrack uses GPS and WiFi access points to figure out where your phone is, and then gives you the option to log that information to Google Calendar. What is nice — and occasionally frustrating — is that backTrack only logs places you’ve visited for at least 5 minutes (this is a variable that the user can set, but 5 minutes is the fewest minutes it offers).

So, backTrack does not give me a record of my 10 minute drive to work. What it does do, however, is once I’ve been in my office for more than 5 minutes, it notes that. Once it detects I’ve left my office, it then creates an entry in my Google calendar showing an appointment spanning the time from when I arrived to when I left. It allows me to configure templates for place, so I can tell it if it detects my home WiFi, that place should be called “Home” in the information it writes to my Google Calendar.

The app is free an overall works very well. Some reviews complain about issues with accuracy, but so far I haven’t notice any issues with that. Of course a bigger issue is the potential misuse of such location data, especially once it is logged in Google Calendar. For me, the potential drawbacks are more than offset by the benefits, but your mileage may vary.

Memory Is Fiction

The other day someone asked me if I had a copy of an email, and before I could respond someone else chimed in, “oh, he’s got it…he saves everything.” Personally, I’m surprised I’m in the minority in this — in fact I often worry about all the stuff that I’m not saving.

Part of the reaction I get is along the lines of “why bother?” The answer is simple — your brain is lying to you. Most of us have intuitions that we are able to accurately remember the past in great detail. My wife and I can have a disagreement about some event that had 10 years ago, and my memory of the event is rock solid. She is just misremembering it.

Except the times I’ve gone back to verify that, my memory is only right about half the time, and often my memory of an event is wildly off on what really happened. And that’s not something peculiar to my memory, but rather a hallmark of how our brains work.

As Jonah Lehrer (from whom I swiped the title of this post) notes , the upshot of research into the fallibility of memory is that the more we remember something the less likely we are to remember it accurately.

After all, we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated.

So when it comes to memory, distrust and verify is the best approach. Fortunately, we have the tools now not only to easily preserve everything, but also to quickly search through that record when it becomes necessary to determine what really happened that one time when…

SMS Backup and Save MMS for Android

I put the unlimited texting plan on my phone to very good use, but texting wouldn’t be nearly as useful if it weren’t for SMS Backup and Save MMS.

SMS Backup automatically copies all of your incoming and outgoing text messages to your Gmail account. It can add a Gmail label to them — I use the very creative ‘SMS’ default label. And that’s it. Its nice, and in my case, very helpful to have the tens of thousands of texts I’ve sent and receive indexed and searchable from within Gmail.

Save MMS takes care of the one texting feature that SMS Backup doesn’t handle — photos, etc. sent via MMS. Save MMS will show you all the photos and other multimedia attachments that have been sent to you, and let you save them to the phone’s SD card.

Not very sexy, but extremely helpful and indispensable applications.

CallTrack Android App

CallTrack is a free call logging app for Android with a twist — it logs phone activity to your Google Calendar. It can log missed, incoming and outgoing calls (and you can tell it log any or all of those). Once it adds the call to Google Calendar, selecting details will show the length of the call, and of course you could always go in and add notes related to the call.

The app will let you choose which of your Google Calendars to sync phone calls with. I went ahead and created a new private Phone Calls calendar just for the app, and so far it has worked flawlessly (thought reviews of the app indicate it does occasionally create duplicate entries — I haven’t seen that yet, though, so it is possible that bug has been fixed).

Damn I love apps that let me effortlessly track one more thing.

Self-Tracking Apps for Android

I’ve been using Zealogs.com to do a lot of self-tracking (seriously — I track several dozen different daily variables from weight to blood pressure, etc), but recently decided for a number of reasons it would be better to do my tracking locally on my Android.

So, off I went to the Marketplace and after installing and uninstalling a number of apps settled on two to handle my tracking needs.

First I added Sleep Bot Tracker Log which, as the name suggests, only tracks one thing — how much sleep I’m getting every night. It is a really well-done app, especially considering its free. Press a widget when you go to sleep, and then again when you wake up, and it tracks and graphs how much sleep you’re getting. Noting when I go to sleep and wake up has always been something I thought was a pain, and this makes it trivially easy (plus I hate having to do the math on how much time I slept if I went to bed at 10:17 p.m. and woke up at 6:03 a.m.)

Second, for everything else, I settled on Zagalaga’s KeepTrack. KeepTrack lets me do almost everything I was doing on Zealogs. It lets me create what it calls a “Watch” which is anything I want to keep track of, and then gives me the option of tracking it as a number, a yes/no flag, or as a text field. It can then chart the values I enter over time and export as a text file or XML.

The only thing I wish KeepTrack had was the ability to add text notes to numerical and yes/no types. For example, if I enter 22,000 as the value in my Steps tracker, I’d like to be able to note what I did that day that resulted in me walking so far above my normal average.

Otherwise, KeepTrack does exactly what I wanted and, like Sleep Bot, is free.

Washington Post Article on Self-Surveillance

Back in September 2008, the Washington Post ran an interesting look at self-surveillance, Bytes of Life, interviewing a number of people who were dutifully tracking numerous data points in their day-to-day lives. It is a good introduction to the subject, but unfortunately focuses on some of the more obsessive types in an already obsessive endeavor. For example,

Self-trackers like  [Chris] Messina and [Brynn] Evans could spend hours online, charting, analyzing, tracking. Life as a series of pure, distilled data points, up for interpretation.

I’m not sure if that’s reporter Monica Hesse’s take on self-surveillance or Messina and Evans really do enjoy spending that much time, but here’s my take — if you’re spending more than a few minutes a day capturing and tracking data, you’re doing it wrong. I’d say on most days I spend about at most 10 minutes doing the charting/analyzing/tracking routine (and I’m currently tracking 16 different variables). This is the computer/Internet age — automate, automate, automate and get back to living your life.

The other thing I find a bit odd in this article and others by proponents of self-surveillance is the extent to which you can make decisions based upon such data. There seem to be people, for example, who track their daily/hourly/whatever moods and then attempt to correlate that with other events.

Tracking can “zoom out over my entire life,” he [Messina] says. It could, for example, help him better understand the aforementioned breakup. “When you’ve self-documented the course of an entire relationship, trivia that doesn’t seem like much could, over time,” help him understand exactly what went wrong, and when.

Maybe, but I doubt it. I suspect that such data would either be obvious — wow, my mood is terrible the day before my dentist appointments as I have a childhood fear of dentists — or it will be specious correlations that are confused for causation.

So what exactly is self-surveillance good for beyond the obsessive need to do it? For me, it is primarily a) a tool for meeting personal goals, and b) a way to objectively look at the progress I’m making on those goals.

For example, I really want to lose about 50 pounds. But losing weight is difficult, and as my daughter’s endocrinologist told me, we have a psychological tendency to overestimate the amount of exercise we’re doing. So if I take the dog for a walk a couple months a day, there’s a strong part of  me thinking “okay, I took the dog for a couple walks, I can skip the treadmill.” Tracking weight, dog walks, treadmill, and other workouts does two things. First, it forces me every day to record objectively just what I did the previous day. Did I get on the treadmill? If not, a big 0 goes in there and I’m reminded I really should have done so. Moreover, I can see pretty much what effect that and other decisions have on my weight.

That’s a fairly traditional method of self-surveillance, but I use the same principle to keep me on target for my reading goal this year. Not only do I track when I start and finish a book, but I go so far as to track and record daily how many pages I read the previous day. Again, when I have to put in 0-15 pages, I realize there’s no way in hell I’m going to meet my goal with too many days like that. On the other hand, when I can stuff 172 in that particular chart, it is a very nice positive reinforcement that says “see, you can really do this.”

I don’t want to turn all Norman Vincent Peale here, but IMO a good portion of life is tricking/persuading ourselves to stay on task to achieve difficult goals. Self-surveillance can play a major role in personal achievement without becoming an obsessive substitute for it.