Blog 18: Habit hacking

A lot of interesting topics were brought up in these two chapters. It amazes me the amount of data that you are able to collect on yourself. Before we started studying self tracking, I did not realize the potential that some of this data could have. A long time ago, I used to try and track the food that I ate. As Gina discussed in chapter three, it is very difficult to do this. I myself had a hard time doing this. At most, I may have been able to track the types of food I was eating for a week. It is really hard to do this especially when you have to individually go in and find the food and record it. Gina brought up a good point about how this may discourage people from eating fresh food because processed food is easier to track. If you are able to stick with tracking, you can gain some very valuable information about a specific thing you tracked.

Another thing that was discussed was habit hacking. This was a very interesting topic. Basically, you track things that you do for example eating a cookie everyday and trying to figure out why you ate it. Was it because of boredom or was it because you genuinely wanted to eat a good cookie? Based off of this data, you could correct a habit that you have. To be successful with these things, the book recommend you start out tracking one thing and you track for a small amount of time. It is hard to break habits and these were some of the recommendations on how to track these.

Questions:

Have you ever tried self tracking?

Is habit hacking something that could potentially help people going forward?

Picture taken from: https://adobe99u.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/habits_550_rev.png

Neff, G. & Nafus, D. (2016). Self-Tracking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Chapters 3]