At the beginning of last year I decided to do my part of the quantified self movement and started a daily log of how much I’ve slept, my mood during the morning, afternoon, and evening, as well as what I ate and drank. There were a couple of stretches where I forgot to fill in the details and did what I could from memory. My mood also had a pretty big impact on the way I filled in the subjective questions but hopefully it balances out over a year. I tracked the data via a Google spreadsheet and exported it as a CSV in order to analyze it via a simple Python script. For now I’ve only pulled some summary stats but will take a deeper look in the next couple of days to examine the distributions and identify any patterns.

• After removing days without data, I’m left with 354 days for the year.
• Out of these days, I was in a good mood for the vast majority (89%) with the remaining days a combination of being sick, getting sick, having a sore throat, or being congested.
• I slept an average of 7.15 hours each night with the most being 11 and the least being 3.
• The most popular breakfast items where cheese (53 days), eggs (45), smoothies (32), bagels (25), with the rest being a various combination of fruits and various dinner leftovers.
• Sandwiches were the most popular lunch item (63 days), followed by soup (42), Chipotle burrito bowls (32), salads (28), and Sophie’s (23), a nearby Cuban restaurant. The remainder were food places that hovered around the teens.
• Dinner was a lot more basic. I had salad at almost a third of my meals with the main dishes being dominated by protein: chicken (43 days), fish (33), turkey (20), salmon (16). My favorite starches were potatoes (34), pasta (27), and rice (16).
• I drink too much coffee averaging 1.3 cups a day. The most coffee I’ve had on a single day was 3 cups which happened on 6 days. The goal is to drop this below 1 a day in 2015.
• I drink too much alcohol also averaging 1.25 drinks a day. Beer (259) and wine (143) made up 91% of my drinking with the rest being a combination of mixed drinks, cocktails, and hard liquors. Similar to coffee, I’ll try to drop the average to below 1 a day in 2015.

Despite being a simple exercise there’s a lot of interesting information that can help me improve in 2015. By looking at the data more and examining relationships between various fields (mood and drinking, drinking and sleep, etc) I’ll hopefully find even more ways to live healthier and better.

On a related note, I’m repeating the same exercise in 2015 but am modifying the template a bit in order to collect more structure data. I’m going to be tracking the times I sleep and wake up rather than the duration and decided to put all the foods under a single column rather than per meal to make it easier to include snacks. The other big change was splitting my mood columns into a physical and a mood component to measure them separately. Looking forward to seeing what I discover in 2015.