Quest Networks

1. Nested and Linked Quests

Let us recall that a quest is a causal hypothesis. Let say that you want to improve your energy by monitoring your weight, your heart rate and your daily activity, with the causal hypothesis that if you manage your weight, keep your rest heart rate low and perform your daily steps, you will feel more energetic. You create an "energy quest" with:

• a target : your energy level that you self-track

• three factor trackers: weight (this is where a connected scale like Withings is handy), heart rate (take adavantage of your Apple watch) and daily steps count.

Knomee is more than a self-tracking tool, it is a self-discovery tool based on formulating and validating or invalidating causal hypothesis.

A key feature of Knomee 3.0 is shared trackers.
Trackers may be shared between quests, which has many consequences:

• trackers may be reused from one quest to another

• you do not need to self-track twice: once a value is entered it is made available to all quests that share the same tracker

• shared trackers create links between quests

The following figure shows two examples where this feature is really useful:

1. Nested Quests:  you may have found that the limit of 3 trackers per quest is limitating in some cases.
   This nested quest example shows how to track a large number of trackers that are related to your target goal (here, to maximize your energy). By introducing "sub quests" that are related to your main quest, you create a set of nested quests (energy, weight, heart rate, sleep).

2. Linked Quests : linking quests with share trackers does not always form a hierarchy (nested), it may create a loop as in the following example where mood depends on having a balanced workload, and getting this balanced workload depends on managing your stress.

2. Quest Networks

When you start as novice Knomee user (or a beginner with self-tracking), you start with a small number of things that you want to track.
A typical user owns a few quests that are autonomous.

After a while, you find many of your quests are related, which is modeled by sharing trackers as in the previous examples.

Instead of seeing your set of quests as a list, it becomes a network of quests.

Quest Networks represent a more advanced form of systemic self-discovery. The example from the next figure is the network of quests described in the previous section. Quests networks emerge as you play with Knomee to add/remove factor trackers that play or do not play a role with your target goal. Future versions of Knomee will assist you to discover theses "inter quest dependencies".

3. Quests Networks and Self-Discovery

A quest network is a systemic insight about what works for you. It represents a higher level of abstraction that a quest which is fairly basic (how to improve one thing with a few factor). As expressed in the previous example, you may discover positive reinforcement cycles with delays. These positive circles are often called "flywheels" : if you work on all the components of the cycle, things get better and better ( the opposite dynamic, going in the "wrong" direction, is what we call a vicious circle.

The following illustration represents, for one of our team member, what can be observed after years of self-tracking with Knomee : two flywheels that influence each other. You see many labels on the dependencies that are insights gained from Knomee quest tracking.  This representation could be made even richer if temporal information about delays was added (remember that Knomee quest analysis includes identifying the causal delays).

It takes some times to master quest networks and to derive systemic insights from self-tracking, but this is precisely what the mission of Knomee is : "self-tracking with sense".

Self-tracking is a discipline, and for most, it becomes boring very fast. Our goal with Knomee is to make your self-discovery journey with self-tracking more interesting, through deeper insights.