Most of the things that I keep are completely automated and I don’t do anything with them. The main way that I see them is because I get mail sent to me every day with the summaries of different things. I’ll glance at that mail for probably half a second or something, mostly just to see if the data came in correctly. The heart rate thing, I’m sure I noticed just by glancing at that mail.

My fundamental thing about personal analytics is, I don’t put any effort into collecting the data. I put effort into getting systems built to do it, and then I make sure the systems keep running.

Actually just yesterday, I was looking in my archives and I discovered something I’d completely forgotten, which is that I used to keep handwritten notes of things like sleep and wake times, before I was doing that automatically. I was just amazed that I had been doing that. It seems like way too much work for me!