Nowadays, a majority of modern life are numbers. Money you earn, money you spend, miles you drive, fly, run or ride by bike. There are many numbers you don’t make any use of. There are even more numbers you don’t think of. There are even numbers you don’t know of.

At the very end it is about what you make out of these numbers. Some time ago I started to run various kinds of data analysis.

For example, in 2012 I went 60 times to the gas station, spending 2774,77 € for gas. Never thought of it being that much. March was a crazy month, it seems I drove three to four times as much as in August where I used to be in vacation or October when I worked mainly from my home office. In November I started a new position, which might explain a new baseline around the 200 € mark – something I definitely should verify end of 2013.

I thought I try to pick the cheapest gas station around, however I just realized more than half of the time I went straight to Total, which is just around the corner. This is a clear indicator to compare prices in the future more in detail as there are better prices than Total offers most of the times.

It was not that hard to gather the data. Most effort went into how I should compare the data. Neither was the process of thinking about what the actual information might tell me that hard. However, it definitely shows you some ways of improvement for the future.

This is only a subset of data I am currently working on. If you are interested in more analysis, just stay tuned…