PhD insight
Reflecting on my physical activity
A story about technology, built environment, and social media
Ever since I started my PhD I got into the Quantified Self (QS) movement and having my boyfriend doing his PhD on understanding how physical activity is impacted by the use of activity trackers has made ever so more interested. I started off tracking my steps, then my productivity (using RescueTime), my sleep, my emails, and my food.
Most of these things I’ve tracked only for a short while (from a few weeks to a few months), enough to gain some sort of epiphany, or ‘digital epiphany’, which usually was something like “right, now I know more about how I behave, and this is no longer so interesting”. While I might start tracking my emails or productivity again in the future, just to touch base again on my way of working, I have been sort of consistent in tracking my physical activity so I thought it would be interesting to think about it a bit more in depth.
When studying behaviour change, I realised how important reflection was particularly in the initial stages of change, but also in later stages, given that behaviour change is not a linear process. So here is me being reflexive on my physical activity, around the QS movement.