Everything Is Data

Think for a second, take a moment and try the following experiment:

• In a moment, close your eyes and when you do, try the follow these instructions:
  • Try to count the beating of your heart
  • Try to count your breaths, how many in? how many out?
  • Try to think of how many times you’ve eaten today
  • Try to think of how many cups of coffee, classes of water, or otherwise beverages you’ve consumed today
• Now do it

What did you find? How many times did your heart beat? How many breaths did you take? How many times have you eaten? or beverages or consumed?

You might not think of it, but everything you do is data. Data isn’t just dollars and cents, it’s not only numbers. Anything you can know is data, count, quantify, qualify, explain, or even understand is data. The world around you is filled with data, everywhere you look is data and we live in an age where we can make it all work for us.

There was a time, before the technological age that we live in where farmers would record weather. This was known as the farmer’s almanac. Data, tons of data, recorded by farmers everywhere that has been used for a long time to be able to predict what the weather is going to be based on patterns. This isn’t data isn’t what you’d think of today in databases and spreadsheets and screens, it was a book, pen and paper, written down for posterity. Eventually, someone figured out that this was useful for understanding patterns. They figured out that weather would repeat itself based on patterns. This lead to more observations, more storage, more measurement. Shifting from a relatively unscientific method of collecting water in a cup to measure how much rain came down in a given time (daily, hourly, weekly, etc.) into sensor-driven data collection and stored in what we would understand today. This data you can now thank for weather forecasts and what do you do with it? Use it to know if you need to wear a raincoat? Bring an umbrella? or even avoid leaving your house, avoiding an accident, and even saving your life.

I have my own story of weather data. As many know, heavy rain can lead to flooding, I’ve experienced this. To try and avoid this sort of headache I set up a system to monitor weather data and alert me when conditions were likely to lead to problematic conditions. The reason for this is that Data is like money, you can have all the money in the world but it won’t matter, it’s what you do with the money (buy a house, fly in a plane, travel around the world, etc.). Similarly, we can know if it’s going to rain or how much, but it’s about what we do with that knowledge… that data. For me, if the data told me it was going to rain heavily, I was going to get buckets to bail water preventing it from seeping into the house. I was going to get towels and the shop vac to clean up any that got inside.

In my work, its the same thing. I can tell you how much money we made, what we product or service sales made that money. I can tell you what’s most profitable or what’s most popular. But what do we do with it? If something is popular and it hasn’t been marketed or promoted, that could indicate market demands. Promotion could amplify the success. If something is profitable and it is not selling well, then we can use the data to better understand the sales that do exist. We can understand who, when, why, and how, we can build a story that explains these sales and find a way to repeat that story more often so we can make more profit.

If you are “interested in data” think about the ways you can data-fy your life. I’ve got a list of things below:

• Track your exercise with a smartphone app or a fitness tracker to see how you can improve your fitness level and use data to get healthier.
• Export your financial transactions and classify them according to what was purchased, when it was purchased, and what you used it for.
• Track your water consumption to ensure that you’re staying properly hydrated and discover if you need to consume more water and hydrate more/better.

Feel free to reach out if you want to get started and you don’t know where to begin.