I've taken approximately 4,056 steps so far today. As a 6'2" bipedal mammal, that amounts to about 1.97 miles. Last night, I slept for 6.1 hours, with my deepest sleep period beginning at 2:10 a.m. and lasting for roughly two hours. If I had to rate my mood from 1 to 100, which I do, I'd place it somewhere around 73.
There — I'm quantified.
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If you haven't noticed, the art of lifelogging and personal data tracking once reserved for medics and athletes has permeated mainstream culture. Jawbones, FuelBands, Fitbits and countless other wearables adorn the wrists of an ever-growing percentage of the tech-savvy population. A quick mobile App Store search for "Sleep Tracker" yields 124 results. Multiple major publications have dubbed 2014 "The Year of the Wearable." To put it succinctly: We're in it deep.
Having my doubts about the usefulness of the Quantified Self movement, I've spent the past 30 days recording my daily activities with a small army of lifelogging apps and my trusty, apparently rash-inducing Fitbit Force.
In the early stages of my experiment, I reached out to graphic designer and data-cruncher Nicholas Felton for some insight into the tracking world. Since 2005, Felton has been releasing "annual reports," a year's worth of his own personal data presented in a book of stunning visualizations. This past February, he released Reporter, a customizable tracking app that helps lifeloggers visualize and gather their data.

A page from Felton's 2012 report cataloguing all of his activities for one year.
Image: Nicholas Felton
Felton is the uncontested Michael Jordan of personal data tracking. With his help, I'm hoping to become at least Charles Barkley.
"This is the 10th year, it's probably the last year that I'll make a report," Felton tells me. "And that's partially because I think the world has really caught up to the stuff that I was doing in those reports."
Aside from Reporter and a selection of other logging apps, Felton uses various activity trackers to record his time spent in his car, at rest and on his computer. He also wears a Narrative Clip and regularly uses a breathalyzer. Even advanced trackers can't hold a candle to him.
"To get the most out of the stuff you're recording, you need to get it somewhere where you can look across the different data sets," he says. According to Felton, data without context is useless.

My sleep schedule, visualized via the Sleepbot app.
Image: Screenshot. Sleepbot
When I reveal my doubts to Felton, he assures me that personal tracking is here to stay.
"I think we're in the super early days of this right now. I don't predict that we'll be in a world where everyone is buying $100 pedometers, but I do think we'll be in a world where everyone will have access to that information," he says.
Don't underestimate the current popularity of lifelogging, either. If the Facebook Lookback video proved anything, it's that we love revisiting things we already know we did, particularly when they're arranged in a pretty way and we're the stars. The added bonus of not doing any work for the results can't be truly appreciated until you've become a slave to your data.
With a handful of apps, I begin tracking my daily activities. Using MyFitnessPal to track my diet, Sleepbot to track my sleeping habits, Fitbit to sync my movements from my wristband and Felton's Reporter to measure almost everything else, I log everything from the existential "Are you looking forward to today?" to the trivial, "What do you smell?"
It is not enjoyable.
Manual data input, as it turns out, is a hindrance to the daily activity it's supposed to be tracking. I frequently put my book down to tell my phone that I'm reading, take my phone out at dinner to let it know I smell hamburgers and zone out of conversations to tell it who I'm talking to. Have you seen Her? It's a lot like Her.
In order to get a realistic scope of my day, Felton recommended I record my activities every 90 minutes. That's a pretty sizable chunk of time, so I decided it's only accurate to also track the time I spend tracking. For a brief moment I tried to track the time I spent tracking my tracking, but I found it too disruptive to my tracking.

Time spent doing activities | Create Infographics
I quickly find that most of the results I'm getting back are obvious. My stress typically increases at the middle of the work day and decreases at the end. Drinking coffee often correlates with smelling coffee. I spend more time with my roommate than I do with my dog who lives three hours away at my parents' house.
Nonetheless, I begin to yield some more revealing results as well. Contrary to my expectations, I actually have a pretty normal sleeping schedule. My vitamin C consumption is right up there with other human males of my size. I talk to my parents more often than they think I do.
Visualized on my phone, my mediocrity is truly a sight to behold.
This, it seems, is the real value of data tracking — revealing small, random yet somehow surprising bits of information that I, the tracker, really wasn't aware of. This data, once given context can then uncover unique patterns, giving me a better idea of why I do what I do.
"People are skeptical about [data]," Felton says. "I think what's missing is a service that leverages the personal value of this data so that people feel like there's a reason for keeping track of themselves."
At the end of 30 days, it's difficult to say if I learned anything about myself that I wouldn't have guessed already. My mood averaged out around a 70 out of 100, my "most smelled" smell was cleaning fluid (for some reason) and I read 1,657 pages.
But according to Felton, thinking about data tracking in terms of what hidden secrets it will reveal is the wrong way to go about it. He uses tracking more as a storytelling method, to give an accurate depiction of his year. Felton is confident that the future will only bring growth for this kind of storytelling.
"I think it's just waiting for the right platforms for this stuff to be brought together. We certainly need a bit more data openness from several parties."
For now, though, we have to work with what we've got.

Who I spent time with: Average mood vs. person | Create Infographics
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