[QS] Quantified Self experiment with Google+ and 42goals

Over the next weeks and months, I will 'upskill' myself in the area of leadership development and designing for it. I've got a pretty broad spectrum over all kind of learning topics (the top 4 we are asked for in our industry: selling, leading, onboarding and specific change programs) and now I'll dive deeper into the leadership one.

Obviously I'll keep you posted on my progress. Usually when I want to dive deep on a domain I first consume all kinds of information sources and then start to talk and discuss with all sorts of people. I suspect this time will not be any different. What will be different is the Quantified Self experiment I'll do alongside. Quantified Self means self-tracking in order to get the facts and deal with them (learn, brag, compare, adjust,...). Facts are objective and provide guidance in my view. Most QS experiments and tools are about tracking health factors such as weight, what you eat (Ralph took pictures of what he ate every day for a month), your mood, etc. (note: if one of my USA friends want to ship me a fitbit, please let me know, you can't get them over here). I want to do a Quantified Self experiment one learning. The two tools I've chosen to record my journey are social network newbie Google+ and the site 42goals.com.

The tag on my + profile tells the world my learning objective: getting better at design4leading. I'll post the activities I undertake and my reflections in my 'learning land' circle.

By the way, I'm not going to list the good and bad of the newest kid on the social network arena. Many have done so before and will continue to do so. But I did observe after one week of lurking that the most active users are the bloggers and twitters I follow as part of my 'learning land' circle and it rather seems to replace twitter than facebook. Some like Luis Suarez are already die-hard fans and are moving from blogs and tweets to + as their primary platform. Others like George Siemens suffer from social media fatigue and miss substance. For myself, I had to figure out a purpose for this new site (I do use a lot of other Google services already). So it's like this for the moment: Google+ for my leadership development journey, Facebook for friends and family and wicked comments, LinkedIn for people I work with and Twitter to feel the pulse and lurking around.

I've also activated a free account on 42goals.com, a young startup for tracking all kind of stuff. For now, I keep it private. It tracks the time a day I spend on learning, doing and sharing and my motivation/productivity and makes nice graphs of the evolution.