A Year of Measuring My Own Task Effectiveness

How does the time of day and sleepiness correlate with my physical and cognitive performance?

I’m a “quantified self” champion. I love measuring my body and brain, and using that data to help me be more effective. So I spent the last year playing games that tested both my mental and physical capabilities. For this experiment, I used Quantified Mind, an online testing platform designed for repeated measures of cognitive performance. It allowed me to play different variations of the same sets of games over and over, and over again.

The Test

The goal of this experiment was to understand how I work best according to 1. the time of the day and 2. how sleepy I am. Everyone has certain intuitions about how their body works best — for instance, I almost always get sluggish around 2pm when my lunch starts digesting, often giving way to an inescapable mental molasses. This makes early afternoon a bad time for meetings. But I wanted to put my theories to the test, so I played the same series of games at different times of the day, every day for a year. Some games tested my memory, while others tested my physical reaction time. Before each session, I would answer a set of questions (e.g. “How sleepy are you on a scale of 1–7?” or “How many hours ago did you wake up?”). The system could then normalize my results (since you’ll inevitably get better at the games purely through familiarity over time) and map out any correlations…