Learning how to use all that data

My Dad borrowed this from Ben Franklin and said it to me very often growing up, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”.

I think sometimes it takes years to unpack that kind of wisdom. Similarly, it has taken me years to unpack how to actually apply all of the data that we have started to have access to.

If you’ve ever signed up and collected data or felt compelled to keep data, perhaps this post will point you towards some sort of outcome in your own life. For ease of thinking about this topic, we’ve picked Health and Wealth to help you frame this in your head.

Health

With some perceived family history of Heart disease, Diabetes, alcoholism, depression, cancer I felt compelled to start making decisions to mitigate my own risks.

As I write this, these apps and their data have helped keep me in the habits of exercise, proper nutrition, and sleep. It is easy to reflect back on years of data with these tools and look at macro trends in one’s life.

With every passing day, the ability to dive deeper into specifics keeps getting better and easier. Lately, the metric HRV has allowed me to see the immediate impact of a “harmless” drink of alcohol on my heart and sleep patterns.

Fitness has also become a competition with the gamification of all of these.

Am I healthier as a result? Absolutely!

Wealth

With all of the life roles, it is super easy to lose track of one’s spending and not have any time to think about saving or even managing the present moment events. Mortgages are due, kids need this, car needs that…

How can you possibly even think of getting to retirement with more and more frictionless experiences available to us to ‘help’ us buy more.

Good or bad over the last ten years it has become easier to collect financial data from multiple sources. Also, you can see some larger organizations are consolidating various companies and creating “bots” and AI to help analyze what you have. It is very good to take advantage of all of the tools available to work in the back end for you.

Although AI keeps getting better at highlighting some trends, it should be noted that humans still do a better job of “feeling” out your life circumstances. The good part about collecting all this data over time for Finance stuff is that you can present it cleaner and more organized to an Organization represented by a human to help you make better spending/investing choices.

There you go! You should be able to take two areas of your life and measure and improve them from this post.

Data can help you be more productive with your time instead of getting lost in the matrix. Happy harvesting!