Pain diaries and stamps

Keeping a pain diary probably isn't something you discuss with your health practitioner. The idea is as simple as it sounds: When you feel pain, you note down where the pain is, how much you feel, and, if so inclined, what caused it.

In a couple of weeks, you'll have enough data to find patterns and adjust. The person who told me of this idea happened to realise that two days after their hard gym session for the week, they felt pain. They split the hard session up, and that resolved one data point. They slowly worked at their diary over time to find what we'd call correlations in statistics.

You'll need to be diligent and write down every time you feel pain for this to work. You can't try to 'remember' when this happened.

Doing something simple and easy is harder than we appreciate. That's why dieticians struggle to get people to keep a food diary. It's not the data input; it's easier to believe the world is different from what we want it to be. No one wants to weigh out their chocolate after dinner. No one wants to write down their pain every time they feel it. We're reminded of who we are, a version we don't want to be.

Easily accessible and overlooked data is more common than we think. Dennis Altman writes in The Monthly:

"Stamps used to portray the official imagery of government, and even today a new state will proclaim its sovereignty with stamps."

"Anyone wishing to study the imperial pretensions of Mussolini’s Italy might well start with the large multicoloured issues from Somalia or Cyrenaica, favouring desert animals beneath Italian aircraft."

What if your organisation spent less time collecting useless data that no one cares about and instead found something as accessible, interesting, and broad as stamps?

Stamps serve the literal purpose of showing that postage has been paid. As Dennis described in his article, a colour and story can't be captured in the simplistic monetary value. Imagine if you collected data that did the same.

Why is this hard to implement?

We're drawn to dashboards like moths are drawn to light. They're almost irresistible, based on my reading of what people hiring analytics staff are looking for, you'll almost certainly be producing a dashboard. When your business analyst is producing a dashboard, no wonder they suck.

In both cases, we become trapped by something designed to guide us. The reason moths are 'attracted' to light is not what we think, "...moths and other flying insects become trapped in their glow."

"According to Dr Sam Fabian, an entomologist at Imperial College London, moths and many other insects that fly at night evolved to tilt their back to wherever is brightest. For hundreds of millions of years, this was the sky rather than the ground. The trick told insects which way was up and ensured they flew level.

But then came artificial lighting. With fresh sources of illumination to contend, moths found themselves tilting their backs to street lamps. This sent them into endless loops around the lamps, the insects trapped by their evolutionary instincts." - The Guardian

Produce a dashboard, and you'll entertain a group of executives for hours while they stare at the numbers and propose theories and ideas. Eventually, every dashboard traps all those involved, from those tasked with collecting and collating the data to those reviewing and monitoring the information. You become unable to get out of this with your volition.

Had you never seen the dashboard, you might have been able to do something worthwhile with your time. Moths become stuck in light because of the ever-increasing light pollution that slowly reduces the darkness of the night sky. You could form this as a Poisson distribution if you so wish.

We see the stars not because they're so bright but because the night is so dark. The more superfluous data you have in your organisation, the harder it's will be to see the information you should look at. A couple of hundred years ago, explorers navigated by the stars. They crossed oceans and continents.

Could you navigate your business with just a few data points? If you can't, then maybe you've become stuck, just like the moth.