The quantified self sounds great on paper. The task: keep track of important facets of your daily life. The result: gain a better understanding of your day-to-day and make better educated decisions, based on the numbers instead of false assumptions and shots in the dark. What’s not to like? Everyone wants to improve his or herself in some way.

To outsiders looking in though, tracking your life in data is ridiculous.

Who has the time to keep track of what you eat, when you sleep, and how many times you fart in the wind? To most people, data journaling (a.k.a. self-surveillance, lifetracking, lifestreaming, personal informatics) seems like a complete waste of time, and I don’t blame them — for now.

It’s kind of relieving to see an article like this come along, because I’ve dealt with the explanation portion of this before. Inspired by the work of Nicholas Felton’s Annual Reports, I started keeping tabs on a handful of my own stats this year – nothing too much, just purchases, caffeine intake, sleep, nights out, etc. Just a few things I figured would be easy enough to track and interesting enough to look back on towards the end of the year.

Of course my friends eventually found out (not that it was a secret, just wasn’t something I felt the need to explain) and thought it was ridiculous.

THEY’LL SEE. They’ll see.