The World According to Daytum
As 2008 came to a close, I found myself reflecting on what I had done during the year, and realized that I had a pretty shaky overall picture of the defining experiences of the previous 365 days. The only reliable data I had about my life in 2008 was a basic Google spreadsheet of what books I had read. How to summarize the rest of it?
There’s no shortage of applications and Web sites that would like to help me track nearly every aspect of my life. I use Mint.com to keep up with my bank accounts and credit cards, and numerous iPhone apps and Web sites will track every bite of food I take, every mile I run, and every pound gained or lost. With an application that is sure to horrify procrastinators everywhere, RescueTime tracks every single application you use and every moment you spend on every Web site you visit, so that you can then sort this data into different buckets to determine your productivity levels.
Indeed, it seems that as a culture we are a bit obsessed with the notion of tracking and quantifying various personal data points for a pre-defined end result, be it to better manage money or time, or lose five pounds. Although this Web 2.0-fueled tracking can be illuminating and indeed quite helpful (Mint.com’s budget tool is especially good), what about tracking the miscellany? The random stuff that makes us who we are? To this end, I returned to a post I had read on one of my favorite blogs, Kottke.org, about a beta service called Daytum.
Daytum describes itself as “a home for collecting and communicating your daily data.” Its potential is brilliantly displayed in site founder Nicholas Felton’s gorgeous annual reports. These are heavily visual, consisting of the numbers that constituted his year (i.e. 33,817 iTunes Tracks Played), an annotated atlas (i.e. Best Mackerel at Yu Zen in San Francisco), and charts (i.e. a pie chart of beer brands consumed). A post-modern approach, certainly, but one that is the most compelling summary of a year or a life I’ve ever seen. After all, isn’t there a cliche about how it’s the little things that count?
My first foray into Daytum didn’t get off to a great start because I didn’t really know what to track. I started by counting my breakfasts, but soon became exceedingly bored with myself since I pretty much eat either oatmeal or granola every day. With Daytum, you can specify exactly what you want to track and how you want to display it, whether in a stacked line chart, as an average, with the greatest number first, etc. Currently, I have a pie chart of all the restaurants I’ve gone to this year, which is heavily skewed towards Soup Freaks, a list of goods baked, and my favorite books of the year (so far).
As one of Daytum’s goals is to communicate daily data, nothing you record is private. The home page displays what others are tracking at that moment, offering surprisingly personal looks at other people’s lives. For instance, you can look at graphs of alcoholic beverages consumed, lists of nail polish colors, pie charts of swear words or nails clipped by finger, and statements like “Best Book Read: Bangkok Tattoo.” Through these glimpses of daily data, you’re able to get a uniquely personal view of what matters to people and what random pieces make up their lives. Today’s Internet, whether or not you attach a name like the “connected Web” or the “social Web,” is at least partially about finding and creating communities. Facebook lets users put up traditional information about who they are and what they like, but Daytum uses broad strokes to enable people to quantify and communicate what really matters to them on a mundane, but incredibly fascinating, level.