Gyroscope Personal Records
Ernesto Ramirez
Ernesto is a newly minted Ph.D. in public health, focused on health behavior. He lives in Los Angeles and has been involved with Quantified Self Labs for the last five years, where he helped grow and coordinate the worldwide QS community. His doctoral work explored the specific behaviors grown out of peoples’ use of activity trackers — how they use their devices and what they do as a result of that.
This past year, he managed to both complete his Ph.D dissertation and run the L.A. Marathon! He joins us to talk about how he accomplished that, and how he used Gyroscope to track and share his progress along the way.
Gyroscope: Your PhD research was on self-tracking. What tools have you been using to self-track your life?
Ernesto: I’ve been a longtime Fitbit user, tracking over 18 million steps since early 2011. I use Moves and Foursquare’s Swarm for location data, and RescueTime to keep track of my productivity and remind me to stay on task.
For weight-tracking, I have a Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale. I also use an Apple Watch to track heart rate and remind me to get up and move throughout the day.
For being active, I use iSmoothRun to track my running, hiking, and infrequent bike rides. I like it because it integrates with all the other services, like Strava and Runkeeper.
2015 was my best year for running
Gyroscope: What is your main goal? Has quantifying it helped you?
Ernesto: My main goals have been to write my dissertation and stay on track with my marathon training. Gyroscope helps remind me of how I’m using my time, which has kept me on track.
It also provides a platform to visualize my running progress — which I really enjoy sharing with my social circle, including my local LA running group, BlacklistLA. I get a lot of positive feedback from these circles, which has been very motivating.
2015 was my best year for running, and the Gyroscope yearly reports were a huge part of that. They made running more social and fun, even when I was out there by myself sometimes.
Ernesto has done the Griffith Park Trail Half Marathon every year since moving to LA in 2012. 2015 was his best year for running, finishing 7th overall, and running his fastest time!
Gyroscope: What are some other runs that you’ve enjoyed?
Ernesto: There are many photos like these in my feed now — cards from running around Los Angeles that focus on different art. A lot of this is due to BlacklistLA, a great grassroots organization here in Los Angeles that supports community, art, and healthy living through running.
Every Monday night, the group meets for a short 3–4 mile run that takes them to a mural or art installation. Running with that group for the last year has not only made me a better runner, but it’s made me appreciate Los Angeles and all its amazing artistry.
Gyroscope: You’ve finished your dissertation this year. Did tracking your productivity data help you get it done?
Ernesto: I found RescueTime to be really helpful.
I’ve been using it for awhile, but never really focused on my productivity score or how I was doing. Once it came time for me to really buckle down, I made a few adjustments that really helped make it actionable.
First, I tweaked the productivity rating of a few apps/sites so that they were weighted as more unproductive (like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc).
Then I used the FocusTime site-blocking feature to enforce productive time.
Third, I set a goal that I was only allowed 45 minutes of unproductive time during the day, after which all unproductive sites were blocked.
While I was completing my dissertation I spent most of my time in just four tools: RStudio (for data analysis and visualization), Atom (for writing code), Microsoft Word (for composition), and Mendeley (a reference manager).
A real insight from this tracking was that I was actually spending almost too much time on data analysis, since I had years and years of data to play with.
But a dissertation isn’t all data analysis. It’s really words on paper. Being able to see, “Wow, I’m spending 7 or 8 hours a day analyzing data” was a wake-up call that forced me to scale back and put more time into writing about and explaining my work.
Gyroscope: You run a lot of services on your phone that are passively tracking — do you find they consume a lot of battery? How do you manage that?
Ernesto: My two tips are:
- Always have a Lightning cable with you.
- Invest in a portable battery.
Most of the apps I use are either transmitting data via Bluetooth or are using background location processing. These are battery intensive processes, so I take steps to manage that.
To minimize daily battery drain, I do the following:
- Reduce the number of apps I allow notifications for, which reduces their on-screen time.
- Disable background location processing for apps that I don’t get any benefit from. i.e. I want it for Foursquare, but don’t need it for Facebook
- Periodically look at what apps are disproportionately using battery and try to determine whether that’s because of my own usage pattern (i.e. checking Twitter too much) or if it’s the app itself.
To catch the next chapter of Ernesto’s story, you can follow him on Twitter. To start visualizing your own workouts and productivity, install Gyroscope app for free from the App Store!
