An experiment of Quantified Self: the life logging of David Achkar

The experiment:

I present here the experiment of David Achkar.

David's blog

David's Twitter account

He is an influent blogger about Quantified Self.

He decided to track every waking minute of his days to know how he really spent his time. For that purpose, he used a simple Google calendar with a color code.

David's activities

Then, he gathered and studied the data and found out surprising things.
I think this experiment is very interesting because we can see how Quantified Self can highlight our cognitive biases. Besides, the majority of David’s discovering are representative of our life.

What David learned with the data:

Thanks to this experiment, David has been able to have data to answer the simple question “What have I 

done this day/week/month?”  And, he found out that his intuition was often misleading.

For instance, productive hours of work were often overestimated whereas less wanted activities like 

procrastinating were underestimated.

His set of data enabled him to build a “manufactured awareness” to be more aware of his time and better choose his activity.

The urgent and the important:

Distractions...

Paradoxically, recording his activities on his smartphone or computer throughout the day enabled David to stand
back and change his viewpoint on the use of the Internet and more generally of technology.

He found out that, very often, the urgent activities like answering an email, doing research for this email, arriving on 

facebook, talking with a friend on the chat were perceived by him as important at the moment. But, some of them 

were not. Therefore, thanks to his experiment, he got the proof with his data that switching too often from one 

activity to another was a huge waste of time.

I think that is something we all know but, seeing the figures about it can be more helpful to change it.