Programmable Self

Description

by Fred Trotter:

"Programmable self is a riff on the Quantified Self (QS). It is a simple concept:

Quantify what you want to change about yourself + motivational hacks = personal change success.

There are several potential "motivation hacks" that people regularly employ. The simplest of these is peer pressure. You could tell all of your co-workers every morning whether you kept your diet last night, for instance. Lots of research has shown that sort of thing is an effective motivator for change. Of course, you can make peer pressure digital by doing the same thing on Facebook/Twitter/Google+/whatever. Peer pressure has two components: shame and praise. It's motivating to avoid shame and to get praise. Do it because of a tweet and viola, you have digital peer pressure motivation." (http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/programmable-self-motivation-hacks-digital-data.html)

Examples

by Fred Trotter:

'Programmable self is the combination of a digital motivation hack, like StickK, with a digital system that tracks behavior, like Fitbit (that's the Quantified Self part). You have to have both. Recently, for example, Stickk started supporting the use of the Withings Scale to support weight entries. Withings is a Wi-Fi-enabled scale that broadcasts your weight automagically to the Withings servers. From there, Withings will send your weight generally wherever you want: HealthVault, other personal health record (PHR) systems, or over to Stickk.com. With that feature, Stickk became a programmable-self platform.

Stickk is pretty old, and Lose it or Lose It, which is focused specifically on losing weight, is also ancient in Internet time. It launched in 2009. The site requires you to take a picture of a weekly weigh in (you actually photograph the scale) and send it in. That counts as digital tracking, but I wonder if it supports Withings (or if it will).

In October 2011, Beeminder launched, billing itself as a direct Stickk competitor, but "for data geeks." Indeed, it is a little geeky: Beeminder is focused on weight change and other goals that are numerically similar to weight change. The notion is that there is a proper path for the improvement of certain numbers — as well as a little "data jitter" to eliminate — in order to improve. Beeminder also refers to the classical term for the lack of self discipline: akrasia — so bonus points for that.

Last November, The Eatery launched from Massive Health. Massive Health is a massively funded dream team, and their first app is a classic programmable-self experiment. You simply take pictures of your food with your camera (digital tracking = photos) and let others rate your food choices (motivation hack = praise/shame). It's a good idea, and you can expect lots more from Massive Health that qualifies as programmable self.

Recently, GymPact made a big splash, even ending up in a New York Times blog post. Gympact is an iOS (soon Android) app that lets you check in at the gym. If you fail to check in, you get charged a fee. If you do keep your commitment to go to the gym, then you also earn some of the money from all of the people who failed to go to the gym.

Finally, Buster Benson and Jen S. McCabe are working on Bud.ge, which might be the first of the programmable-self platform plays.

All of these count as programmable self. I seriously doubt that any of these companies were aware of my original interview about programmable self or would even be comfortable with the term." (http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/programmable-self-motivation-hacks-digital-data.html)