Programming fun at startup: Data motivates you to do more

Programming fun at startup: Data motivates you to do more

I always believed in "Trusting data" over human gut but lately I have been observing a simple fact that being data driven has a side effect, "it motivates you and  keeps you on track". Some recent examples are:

Fitbit: Last year I started the afternoon walk because by 2:00PM after doing calls and replying to a lot of emails the brain would be fried and I wont have energy left to code or think.  Doing these 30 min walk daily recharges the brain. I  had an Omron pedometer sitting around for almost an year and I seldom took it with me on walks. The problem with it was that it used to store last 30 days data of my steps and other things but it didn't had a good way to graphically see the data. When it comes to data "less is more" but also one more important aspect is that you need to present your data in graphs so it doesn't take a huge amount of cognitive effort to make sense of it.  Recently my employer gave a fitbit to everyone who participated in summer challenge and it isn't a better  pedometer than my old Omron but immediately I saw that it can sync data stored on pedometer via bluetooth to my fitbit app and after a week I see this. Immediately in 1 sec I can see that I am lagging this week and need to catch up.

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