Lately, in the vein of a project I’m working on with Sri, I’ve been thinking a lot about analytics as it relates to personal growth and development.
Enterprises have used dashboards because, as the cliche goes, knowledge and information is power. And the credibility and confidence to make the right decisions. (ignore the fact that sometimes organizations who solely base decisions on metrics suffer from analysis paralysis).
When one thinks of the littered landscape of widgets- it’s essentially a personal dashboard (In fact, that’s what Apple’s widget platform is called). It presents the user information about some current or future situation: What’s the weather like on wednesday? What’s in my Netflix queue next? What are my tasks like?
Increasingly, there seems to be an overlap between this level of quick-reach access to information(widgetization), personal growth and development (personal optimization), and this super
This productivity heatmapping link made it to Digg a few days back.
It was similar to something I’ve looked at recently: My google SEARCH history. Wow, such fascinating (if somewhat creepy) stuff! I can check by times of the day, days of the week, and even see a calendar view.
If you look at my daily search activity, there seems to be a HUGE number of web hits on Mondays, and it straight lines down to Friday. This is, as far as I am concerned, inexplicable as of now. I have no idea why I’d be googling more on Mondays– I can’t even definitively say that it has something to do with my class schedule because this graph is generated over the course of me using google web search history, more than a year ago now probably. Fascinating, eh?
Today, Pete sent me a link to Microsoft’s the Future of Personal Health Care presented at MIX. Notice the emphasis on the exchange of information in a variety of visually rich media between the “user” and the people she interacts with.
Just stopped by to say thanks for the link. I like your site and the things you talk about, especially now as I’m getting hits to develop the referenced concepts into software or applications. Keep up the great work!