The Quantified Anatomy of a Paper

I previously blogged on my adventures in self quantification (QS). In that post I wrote about the general system but did not delve into specific projects. Ultimately however the utility of self quantification is in the detailed insights it gives, and so I’m going to dive deeper into a project that passed a major milestone earlier today: publication of a paper. If you’re interested in the science behind this project, see my other post, A New Way to Read the Genome. Here I will focus on the application and utility of QS as applied to individual projects.

10 Months at Harvard, Quantified

I will soon reach the one-year mark of my fellowship at HMS, which seems like a fitting time to examine how effectively I have spent my time here so far. I have been a practitioner of self quantification long before the movement acquired its name, having tracked some aspect of my life since I was 16. Given the movement’s growing popularity, I thought it appropriate to share some of my life hacking experiments. My approach has cyclically peaked and waned in sophistication, something that I will expound upon later in the post, but I believe that the overall trajectory of my effort has been that of increasing usefulness. Any lifestyle change, particularly one that involves compulsive tracking of one’s behavior, ought to result in actionable information that is demonstrably useful and not merely be a quantitative exercise in vanity. In this post I hope to show that this can in fact be the case for self quantification.