So, last Wednesday marked the completion of my first 30 years wandering on this planet with little fanfare. The fact I am here to write this does draw attention to the minor accomplishment of not managing to have accidentally killed myself in the previous decade, despite what some may claim were at times my best efforts. But, I am still here, and for that I am thankful.

This is a surprising uneventful occasion for me. I'm not particularly excited for it. Nor am I particularly dreading it, like some people who almost need to be dragged kicking and screaming out of their 20s. I'm delaying any celebration until I've wrapped up some school obligations. But even considering that, it's a decidedly low-key event. Most of this apathetic feeling stems from the fact that any birthday celebrations are overshadowed by the (hopefully) imminent completion of my PhD. In light of that, a birthday feels more like a participant award. You don't have to earn it, you just get on for showing up.

However, 10 years from now, I'll probably have to think what day that I defended my dissertation. But my birthday will still serve as a marker for the progression of time. And as the dust is beginning to clear from my research paper submissions, I've been thinking a lot more about the future.

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OK. The dust from the Quantified Self Conference has settled and I'm still trying to take stock of everything I saw and did and all the amazing people I talked to. I think the best metaphor was it was the homebrew computer club of this decade. The things I saw and heard about there are what regular people will be hearing about ten years from now, but I'll save the remainder of my summary for another post. I'll have a longer write-up of things shortly, but sufficed to say it was an incredibly inspiring weekend. You'll have to forgive the long delay in writing this. The last 2 weeks in San Francisco have been a jam-packed schedule of work meetings and social meetings. I've also been dedicating a large amount of time to thesis writing, and my brain can only produce so many words per day.

I moderated a breakout session on attention tracking. It was a very last-minute job of pulling my resources together and I wasn't sure how useful or well-received it would be. Much to my relief, it ended up being a great success, not by my doing but the wealth of knowledge brought by the people that chose to attend. This same breadth of topic is also partially responsible for my tardiness in posting this summary. It's proven very difficult to distill an overview of all the points made during what ended up being a very eclectic breakout session. What follows is an attempt to both summarize and elaborate on that discussion.

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I am hosting a breakout session on attention tracking at the [Quantified Self conference][], this weekend May 28-29 in Mountain View, CA. Consider this a last-minute advertisement for my session along with some advance material to spark discussion.

So, what about attention?

In the seminal Principles of Psychology, William James defines attention:

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French > is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.

I think it's safe to say that everyone knows what it means to pay attention. They've felt the internal state where all of their mental resources dedicate themselves to a single task. Similarly, I think everyone has felt that they've lost that quality or could not sustain it at one point or another. However, while the act of paying attention may be a universal experience, it isn't necessarily easy to define, let alone quantify.

The simplest definition I can think of is how attention tracking would differ from time tracking. If I used a program like RescueTime, it might tell me that during an hour I spent 10 minutes reading and reply to email and 50 minutes doing another activity. I spend 1/6 of my time on email, regardless of how I allocated it.

On the other hand, attention tracking would be a finer-grained measure of that involved some understanding of the time required to switch between activities. Replying to my email in a single 10-minute block at the end of the hour would be vastly different than if I checked it 20 times, every 2 minutes. In short, how do our attempts at multitasking erode our ability to perform any single task to the best of our ability? Culturally, we suffer from an epidemic of continuous partial attention.

My personal background in the matter is how to approach dealing with my attention-deficit tendencies. I can minimize/block external stimuli, but still have to contend with my mind generating new distractions. My primary interest is the relatively simple goal of building tools to measure how often I switch away from whatever the task at hand with the hope this will help me understand what causes me to be more distracted. Especially while at the computer.

However, this means of measuring attention is just one interpretation based on my experience and difficulties with the number and time between changing activities. What about more complex (and difficult to measure attributes)? Would a better approach include a means of quantifying the degree of focus during an activity, not simply how frequently one was distracted from the activity at hand. Or is attention something more abstract, like mindfulness or flow?

Then, once defined, there is the separate issue of how to track attention without adding more distraction? Is it best to treat attention tracking like sleep, where only passive measurements are taken during the activity itself? What other tools can help, especially away from the computer such as eye-tracking or EEG readings (2)?

At this point, I can honestly I have at least as many questions as answers. Come share your interpretations and experiences tracking attention, however you define it and kick off a good discussion. If you plan to attend or have something you'd like to share, please get in touch with me: contact@matttrent.com.

So, somewhere along the lines of the last week I managed to know my site offline. I'm not sure what I did, but some portion of the framework on the server that runs the side inadvertently got updated when I made some changes on my local machine.

Long story short, I manage to set something up that continually crashed my Heroku instance. I'm sure this is 100% my doing. I just don't know which part of my doing. Sigh. Exactly what I didn't need to deal with this week. No matter, it forced me to do some upgrades that I'd been meaning to.

I switched over to the new Nesta gem, dropped in all my existing content and after a few tweaks we are good to go. Only downside is that most of the styling of the site is gone. I pretty much hammered my stuff into the default template, broke a few things and left it at that. You'll have to excuse the fuggliness for the next while until I get this put back together properly.

We're having another meetup of the Vancouver chapter of the Quantified Self groups. I know this is hot on the heels of our last meetup, but we have some guests in town and it would be a shame not to take advantage of their presence.

For those not aware, SIG CHI, one of the largest human-computer interaction conferences is taking place in Vancouver this May. The conference includes all-day workshop on research into different aspects of personal informatics, organized by Ian Li.

Costs to attend the workshop alone start at $450, but some of the speakers have been kind enough to talk about their work at our little group. We're still working out the final details but the evening will be a combination of recaps of some workshop's talks, demos, and opportunity for longer Q&A. More details on what exactly constitutes personal informatics follows, or check out personalinformatics.org.

Meetup details

The meetup takes place next Tuesday. All the details and RSVP are on the event page of the QS Van meetup group. Our friends at iQMetrix have been gracious enough to host us again. You'll need to get let up to the 12th floor, so either get in touch with me, or hang out in the lobby with other folks and someone will be down to get you.

• When: Tuesday, May 10th at 7pm
• Where: iQMetrix Offices -- 250 Howe Street, Suite 1210

We'll do 30 minutes of meet and greet, get down to business at 7:30, and continue with beers afterwards somewhere nearby.

This should provide a really interesting topic for discussion. I think this will be a real treat and hope you can attend.

What is Personal Informatics

Personal informatics is a class of systems that help people understand their behaviors, habits, and thoughts. Developing such systems poses new challenges in human-computer interaction and creates opportunities for collaboration between diverse disciplines, including design, ubiquitous computing, persuasive technology and information visualization. This workshop will continue the conversation from the CHI 2010 workshop and extend the discussion of personal informatics to include behavioral theories that can guide the development of such systems, as well as the social implications of self-tracking.

Major themes:

• Challenges in developing personal informatics systems.
• Behavioral theories to guide the development of personal informatics systems, such as self-regulation and goal setting.
• Social implications of self-tracking.

Topics of interest:

• New and current personal informatics applications and systems on the desktop and online
• Sensor and life-logging technologies that monitor various personal behavioral information
• Effective feedback techniques, such as visualizations, virtual agents, and persuasive technologies, that help users become more aware of their own behaviors
• Interaction techniques that alleviate the burden that personal informatics impose on engagement
• Effects of self-knowledge and self-awareness on behaviors and daily life
• Methods of conducting long-term studies to determine effects of information on user behavior