Quantified Impact

One of the reasons that I love Quantified Self is because watching people tell their show & tell self-tracking stories gives you real window into the things that people care about. Yet it's also true that people are often "searching for their keys where the light is", that people track what is easy to track, rather than what they actually care about. Sometimes what is tracked is a good proxy for what people care about, but other times (pedometers, cough cough), not so much. Tracking something you don't actually care about fails to have any impact, because it doesn't connect with your life.

One of the things that I've come to care about increasingly in the last few years is impact - am I making a difference that matters? I don't think I'm the only person who cares about this - everyone cares about their legacy and whether they are having a positive effect on others and the world. And yet, it's very rare to hear people even talk about impact, let alone try to operationalize it, or improve it, etc. What gets measured gets managed. How can we measure impact?

This Quantified Impact meetup will be a roundtable discussion about impact. What is it? How can we measure it? How can we improve our impact, or make it more positive? I'll give a brief ten minute overview of some of my thoughts ("heroic impact", "impact interviews", the importance and difficulty of acknowledging your impact), and then we'll open it up. I'd love to hear all kinds of things:

• stories of impacts people had, good and bad, on purpose or by accident, by you or on you
• have you ever tried to measure your impact? How did you do it?
• do you know of any good resources on impact? Books? Workshops? People?
• have you thanked someone for the impact they had on you? Why and how did that go?
• do you keep mementos of your life, or a jar of awesome, or a gratitude journal? How do those things relate to impact or validation for you?
• what has been the impact of self-tracking (or quantified self more generally) on you?
• have you ever done an Impact Assessment or used other corporate/governance tools like that? Please tell us about that and whether it was valuable, and if you think it could be applied at a personal level?
• anything else you think is relevant or interesting about impact or related topics

The goal for this session is that we all come away with some interesting new tools and ideas for how to have more/better impact, and how to measure and acknowledge it. All are welcome; you do not need to contribute (say anything) to attend. We value diversity and inclusion, so if this topic is interesting or important to you, you are the kind of person who belongs at this meeting, and we'd love to hear your voice. See you there!