A Tyranny of Data

A few years ago, I took off my fitness band and put it, along with its flaky USB charger, in a decorative box on my desk at home.?Prior to that, I’d worn the band (and its predecessors) for years.?

A fitness band on its own is not evil, really.?My band hugged my increasingly pudgy wrist like a sleek futuristic handcuff, sometimes flashing with different colored lights or buzzing to some silent hip-hop beat playing inside its tiny cybernetic brain.?

And it gave me data! So. Much. Data. Here’s what I learned:

• I take big steps:?My husband and I can walk the same exact distance, side-by-side, at the same time.?Like, the length of Downtown Disney, for example.?His band, made by the same maker, bought at the same time, will credit him 5,810 steps.?My band gives me 3,017 steps.?I’m a big strider.
• I am leading a double life:?Apparently, I wake up multiple times a night.?While I had no memory of these periods of lucidity, my band tracked and displayed them.?The band also subtracted these waking periods from my sleep total.?This data was so compelling, that I began to wonder what I must be doing during those time periods.?Brief alien abductions? Graveyard shift at Denny’s??
• It’s impossible to meet any goal I set:?The problem is that the universe (or maybe the aliens) are hell-bent on sabotaging any fitness goal I set out to document.?Seriously—I could set my sleep goal to a dramatically low 4 hours and my step goal to a laughable 1,500 steps and I’d either forget to charge the battery or leave the band on the shelf next to the shower and there would be no way to make up for this—one more time, goal not achieved.
• The wrong things matter: An intense 45 minutes of lifting weights, a 30-minute sprint on the elliptical—these counted for nothing.?But I could amble from the TV to the fridge for a bowl of ice cream and back and get more steps.?Plus, if I was sneaking the ice cream while the rest of the family was occupied, my heart rate was actually slightly higher than for the workouts.

Why, you wonder, would I ever relegate such an important data source to a decorative box??I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I have a somewhat dissatisfying answer for you.

The problem is that this fitness data, including all of the analysis and value judgements and advice that comes with it, does not match my perception of reality nor the outcome of my activities.?I know that the data is measured, tested and granular.?I know that, in relative terms, it is highly accurate.?But it isn’t quite right.?

In the beginning, I relied heavily on it.?I believed that if I got a certain number of steps and a certain amount of quality sleep I’d lose weight.?But I didn’t lose weight because of those factors, no matter how I moved the needle on the data.?The correlation between my fitness band’s measurement of my steps/sleep and weight loss was not quite right.

And in the end, because it wasn't quite right, and because I also had discovered ways to game the system, I stopped relying on it.?Moreover, in some cases, I’d taken to completely, vehemently ignoring it.?It became merely a distraction, an annoyance, a tiny too-tight tyrant.?

For those of us who are relying on data to inform our decisions, sometimes at the expense of our own feelings and observations, we'd do well to take the lessons of our fitness trackers to heart.

Any action informed by a tyranny of data will always fall short of the mark.??