This week, the subject of AI and data kept coming up relentlessly in my work and personal life: even more so than usual. In each of those conversations, I talked about my own personal data collection process (text journaling and passive biometrics), and the methods by which I extract useful data out of them for my own AI use cases.
Raw data is interesting, but what I really emphasize in my data analyses is attention: what is the direction of the data, its recency/reinforcement over time, and can we interpret or predict future patterns from it?
Generally, raw data needs some sort of criteria to be valid or useful, in my mind's eye. Given that journaling is highly rich and personal candid data, there needs to be some pattern I use in my thoughts to constantly extract high-quality signal.
I have two heuristics (not hard rules, but general guides) I join together to create an effective mental stack for attention management in collecting personal journal data:
If it will not matter 5 years from now, I will not spend more than 5 minutes thinking about it now.
If I think about it at length, I write it down.
These are for measuring importance and attention. This helps me with the "what" of the data.
This also creates a rather effective mechanism and virtuous cycle where by writing down the objects of my focus and desires, my mental circuitry around those things strengthens - and conversely, objects of negative desire (or things I don't want in my life) receive less reinforcement.
There's also the problem of junk data - things that hijack our attentions, pollute our mental streams. When I say "attention is a cursor", I refer to the notion that our attention is a laser, pointed at any given thing at a point in time (not unlike a mouse cursor on a screen); now, imagine if your mouse was on a moving train, and constantly shaking with all sorts of randomness. It'd be really difficult to get a solid grip on a particular pattern.
Have you ever opened up your phone after waking up, and saw something that set you off into a thought spiral? If so, you know exactly what I'm talking about: our attentions can be hijacked, and our energies diverted. I'm no stranger to this: it's happened to me before many times. I see something on LinkedIn, in my email, on Instagram or Discord, that sets my mind thinking before the day has even started. In this sense, it's more like environmental pollution that we must be aware of.
A few years ago, I remember going on Reddit daily - and I realized that I was getting more net negative/pessimistic information (especially in comments sections), than was inspiring me. Even though there are select subreddits that tend to be optimistic and purpose-driven, and you can subscribe selectively, as a whole, proximity can lead to rabbit holes much easier - and that's an environmental hazard.
In this sense, for my own refinement and collection process, I deliberately pre-filter out as much junk data as I can, so that what remains is high signal: and that my attention cursor is as stable and steady as possible with as little effort as possible. If you can cut out junk data and get your attention cursor on a level surface, you're already more than halfway there.
Be well,
Michael Kirsanov