Here’s a year-end recap app that could actually be useful: ToutApp analyzes your email throughout the course of the year and provides data on your busiest month, day of the week and time of day for email exchanges. It also tells you who you email the most, who you receive the most emails from, and which marketers send the most emails.

An application that analyzes your email accounts may seem like a huge waste of time, but the purpose of ToutApp is to make users more aware of what their email patterns are so they could, theoretically, be more efficient with their time. According to Pingdom, 107 trillion emails were sent worldwide last year, up from 90 trillion in 2009; an average of 294 billion emails are sent per day.

ToutApp can take some time to work, depending on the size of your inbox. It took a couple hours for the ToutApp to scan my entire Gmail inbox — around 15,000 emails — and it eventually revealed that I receive more emails than I send. I also learned that January of this year was my busiest month in terms of email traffic (I’m going to unscientifically pin that one on the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which probably upset the average), and that I send the most emails between 8 pm and 9 pm — which makes me a fantastic dinner date. ToutApp also listed individuals as well as circles of people I email with the most, and highlighted key words that often appear in my email.

Some of the data, such as the list of emails from marketers, could be channeled into usefulness. And ToutApp’s analysis says I received hundreds of Facebook notification emails this year, which reminded me that I should probably disable “Notifications,” as that would help declutter my inbox.

But other info — such as the fact that “FW” is a key word that often appears in my emails — didn’t tell me much, except that I get a lot of forwarded mail.

ToutApp only works on Gmail accounts, and in order for it to work, you have to allow it access to your Gmail account. The company is not affiliated with Google, and it says says that during the analysis process it will not have access to your password or any other personal info through your Google account.

Google’s information section on third-party access says the data and activities available to third-party sites, like the ToutApp, depend on the Google product;, some apps may not be able to add or modify data or may be able to see a small portion of data. (To unsubscribe after your ToutApp report is generated, you can go to Authorizing Applications & Sites under the My Account area in Gmail, and revoke access.)

ToutApp comes from a San Francisco-based start-up that offers email management services for business owners. According to its Web site, Tout is backed by venture capitalists Esther Dyson, Dave McClure and Eric Ries, along with other angel investors and seed-stage firms.

If you’re looking for apps that dissect non-Gmail accounts, a research group from the MobiSocial laboratory at Stanford University has created something called MUSE, or Memories Using Email, that works to analyze and chart your exchanges across different email accounts. There’s also something called Topalt Reports for analyzing email through Microsoft Outlook.

For data nerds everywhere, the pinnacle of numerical navel-gazing has, at least since 2005, been Nicholas Felton’s beautifully designed “Annual Reports” on the numbers behind his personal behavior.

He has meticulously recorded, quantified, analyzed and laid out all manner of data from his life in a series that riffs on the annual reports that businesses issue to their shareholders.

Instead of earnings and capital expenditure statements, Felton’s reports are full of numbers like cost-per-mile-run at the gym and how many hours he worked from home versus office.

And now, of course, there’s an app for that.

Daytum, the name under which Felton and his co-creator Ryan Case have released what is essentially a consumer-focused designers’ portfolio project, previously existed only as a Web app to help users track and organize the everyday data of their lives.

The Apple iPhone version, released on New Year’s Eve, puts the sans-serif-chic data collection interface into your pocket and out into the world, where life’s data actually happens.

So, what is it good for?

Felton and Case hope that the app, plus a forthcoming API to their Daytum Web application, will enable more people to see their own data in a new way.

The app is designed to help you begin tagging the pieces of data that you’d like to track.

There’s no automated input. Just tap the screen to create a category of data you are interested in tracking.

Add the category “Lunch” and then set up some recurring fields under lunch. “Sandwich,” for example.

Then, anytime you eat a sandwich, or anything else, for lunch, you can quickly mark it down.

The app allows you to add data points as they happen, even if you don’t have an Internet connection right then.

How else would you track how much money you give to subway musicians each month?

So, we ask again, what’s it good for?

Whether or not you ate a sandwich today, Felton admitted, is not all that interesting. He claims the data of life becomes more compelling in the aggregate.

Maybe you’d like to know how many miles you walked this month, or how your mood correlated with the weather, or if you or your partner changed more diapers this year.

It might not seem like groundbreaking stuff, but the data of a life starts to tell a story when laid out, clean and collected, in Felton’s various visualizations.

Felton said that data’s value comes on may levels.

“It helps you see and share all kinds of stuff about your life–it can be really interesting to people who know you,” he said.

Digitizing the human analog data of the world is certainly a growth area in tech.

Tools have emerged to find out when users are awake via their tweets, there has been major growth in mobile purchase tracking and patents are being awarded to companies that offer deals based on where a person goes.

If the renaissance of this arena is still years off, it might be the perfect time to try to get ahead of the curve and tap the brains of people who are already thinking like it’s 2015.

Felton has spent the last half-decade staring at and organizing his own data and, more recently, the data of others via Daytum.

I asked him what wisdom he might have gained from his unusual pursuit.

“People seem to record binary items really well–things like one drink, or watching one TV show,” he said. “Recording gets harder and less regular when it’s things without a set size or quantity, like when they ate a meal.”

When I asked if he felt suspicious of the businesses that were gathering his data, he came back with something a little deeper.

“I think the walling up of data by businesses is really a missed opportunity, not cause for suspicion,” he said. “Someone knows how long it has been since I called my mother, but I can’t be certain. That information could be valuable to me.”

He added: “Businesses seem to be stuck on the idea of loyalty rewards being about points.”

For Felton, data can be its own reward.

His next data-driven project might bring the whole idea home.

Felton’s father passed away in September, and he’s decided to postpone his 2010 report for something larger and more personal.

So, he will release a single report on all of his father’s 81 years based on data gathered from years of slides, travel postcards, “FasTrak” auto toll payments and myriad other sources.

“I have gotten to know things about him that I never knew while he was alive,” he said. “I’ve learned that he was much better at maths and sciences than English back in school. I can actually quantify that.”

But the question on the minds of so many emerging data-driven businesses is: How well can we know people, our users and consumers based on their data?

Finding that answer seems to be Felton’s personal mission. And in the spirit of his other reports, he will share it, and the tools he uses to find it, with the world.

Still not convinced of what it’s all good for? We’ll let him explain for himself in this video interview: