My Big Decade is a geeky exercise in focus, and it involves plenty of data keeping for the sake of monitoring. Most people are relaxed and monitor nothing. At the other extreme are those within the “quantified self” movement, dedicated to (in Wiki words) “incorporate[ing] technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life.” This seems extreme even to me. But one could get fascinated . . .
Check out Steven Jonas’s article “Shannon Conners: A Lifetime of Personal Data.”