Why a Report Card?

I compiled my stats for the last two months since last I reported. I have some categories for the way I look at things - activity, mental health, amusements, weight, and money. I've been posting the first three here. As I took a look at this, and looked at comments from previous report cards,

I also spent some time thinking about why these particular stats.

In my working life, I spent a lot of time with metrics. How you measure them, how you interpret them, what you use the information for. There was a fad in the 1990s for the "balanced score card". The basic idea was it was useful for companies to measure not only traditional things like finances and productivity, but also other items that could prove important to the company, like human capital and customer satisfaction. The theory was that things you paid attention to were likely to improve, and if your company believed these "softer" things were important, you would pay attention to them, try to improve them, and reward your people for doing them well. But softer things are harder to measure directly. Often they need to be measured indirectly, inferred from other items. There are tradeoffs around how much effort should go into counting the hard to quantify. And there are debates around whether the things you can count are shedding light on what is really important. So there is art as well as science to this process.

When I first started this blog, I focused on diet and exercise. I've been tracking my weight more or less daily since 1998. During my first Big Weightloss, I tracked not only my weight, but also my exercise times, recorded manually, into a spreadsheet. The first personal activity wearable trackers hit the market in 2010, just as I started this blog, and I was an early and enthusiastic adopter, poring over the statistics they produced. I learned my memory is not a good record of what I've actually been doing, and wanting to see a positive change in the numbers can be a good motivator for me. So I'm sold on personal measurement for personal improvement.

The approach of the balanced scorecard is attractive to me. Fitness is very important to me, so is my weight (possibly more than it should be). But clearly a well-rounded individual has more to them than fitness and appearance. But how to measure these?

So the things I choose to show here are partly chosen simply because I can count them. Just as I have a wifi scale that records my weight automatically, and a fitbit that does the same with my sleep and steps and other items, I've aimed at things that can be measured with minimal effort. I meditate using an app on my iphone that keeps stats for me. I track my migraines on an app as well - it'll produce a report I can share with my doctor.

How can I measure personal fulfillment and social connections and creativity? I need to start by trying to get more specific about what are my goals. So in no apparent order: I want to stay mentally engaged, including with current culture. I want to stay socially engaged, keeping up with good friends and finding new people. I want to travel. I want to sail. I want to be a good steward for my little slice of the planet. I want to support my family. I want to be engaged as a good citizen. I want to lead a bigger life than I do on the couch with my ipad. 

Also, I don't want to be creepy by recording every interaction I have with friends and family! 

So that's what's driven the categories I'm recording under the general heading of "amusements".  What can I measure with a minimum of effort that reflects the above aspects? Many areas are not measured at all, but several are, at least indirectly. 

Because most of my reading is on the kindle, and the kindle can be connected to automatically record finished books in Goodreads, I can count my books with a minimal of manual entries. I found an app for recording movies watched - it's a manual entry to note what I watched (but all the info about the movie is in the app, I just check a box that I watched it), but otherwise similar to Goodreads - it keeps the records and produces the stats. 

Blogging, taking pictures for blogging, making graphs for blogging, thinking and planning about blogging, is one tangible bit of my creative life, and it can be captured neatly by looking at the number of posts I've done. "Trips downtown" shows when I'm leaving my couch and my block to venture further afield. Sometimes it's to see friends (that's mostly from the Before Times), sometimes it's to shop, to go to a museum, or to take a walk. Number of nights away from home measures longer travel, and days at the boat is self-explanatory.