Willpower

share data, and encourage one another.
    Esther Dyson, the famously prescient Internet guru and investor, sees the Quantified Self movement as both a smart financial investment and virtuous public policy: a revolutionary new industry that will flourish by selling what’s good for you. Instead of paying doctors and hospitals to repair your body, you can monitor yourself to avoid illness. Instead of heeding marketers’ offerings of fast foods and instant pleasures, you can set up your life so that you’re bombarded with messages promoting health and conscientiousness. “So far, marketers have been really effective at selling goods and other things that undermine our willpower,” Dyson says. “We need to apply those techniques to strengthen it.”
    Dyson has always been disciplined herself—she’s been swimming an hour every day for decades—but she finds it even easier now that she’s monitoring herself with new electronic sensors like the Fitbit clip, the BodyMedia armband, and the Zeo “sleep coach” headband. By measuring her movements, her skin temperature and moisture, and her brain waves, these sensors tell her exactly how much energy she expends during the day and how many hours of good sleep she gets at night.
    “Self-quantification changes my behavior on the margins,” she says. “I walk up more stairs and take fewer escalators because I know I get more points for the extra steps. If I’m at a party in the evening, I’ll tell myself that if I leave now, I could go to bed at nine-thirty instead of ten-thirty, and I’d get more sleep, and my sleep number would look better in the morning. In many ways, it frees me to do the right thing because I can blame my behavior on the numbers.”
    Thanks to companies like Mint.com , it’s easier than ever for people to follow Charles Darwin’s advice about tracking finances, but these new tools are doing more than just the grunt work of monitoring behavior. Keeping track is the first step, but it’s not necessarily enough. Thomas Jefferson was astonishingly compulsive about noting every penny he earned and spent—even on July 4, 1776, when his revolutionary declaration of human rights was being finalized and adopted, he made sure to record in his memorandum book what he spent for a thermometer and some gloves. As president, he tracked the White House’s bills for butter and eggs at the same time that he was making the Louisiana Purchase. Yet he didn’t put the details in perspective until it was too late. When he eventually stepped back to balance his assets and liabilities, he was shocked to discover that he was disastrously in debt. Recording the data had given him a false sense of being in control of his finances, but it wasn’t enough. He needed the sort of analysis offered by Mint’s computers.
    Once you let Mint look at your banking and credit card transactions, it categorizes them to show where your money is going—and whether you’re spending more than you make. Mint can’t force you to change your habits (the computers can only read your records, not touch your money), but it can make you think twice. It can e-mail a weekly financial summary and send a text message when your account balance is low. It will nudge you with an e-mail reporting “Unusual Spending on Restaurants” and alert you when you exceed your budget for clothing or groceries. Besides generating some guilty sensations in the spendthrift brain, Mint offers rewards for virtue. You can establish a variety of short-term and long-term goals—taking a vacation, buying a home, saving up for retirement—and then get progress reports.
    “Mint will help you set a goal and a timetable and then watch your spending,” Patzer says. “It’ll say, If you cut back one hundred dollars a month on restaurants, you can retire 1.3 years sooner or buy your BMW twelve days sooner. You don’t think about these goals on a day-to-day basis. You want that iPad. You want that coffee. You want to go out with your friends. This quantifies how your short-term behavior affects the long-term goals so you have a chance of actually budgeting in a way that makes a difference.”
    No one knows exactly how well this works yet, because Mint is a commercial operation, not a controlled experiment. But there are already some encouraging signs, as we found when we asked the Mint research staff to look for broad trends in people’s spending habits before and after they joined Mint. It wasn’t easy to