The Tracking Problem

Some Context

There has never been easier to track and measure everything around than right now. Pen & paper is easily accessible, every device in our life hast dozens of notes apps, spreadsheet apps, documents app. If you don’t know how to start storing your data, representing your data, make sense of your data, there are hundreds of bundles containing hundreds of templates, free or paid, ready to be used.

And if the data entry and storing weren’t easy enough yet, there is this constant stream of influencers pushing the idea to track your calories, track your steps, track your weights, track your sleep, track your habit of tracking so you know when felt short of tracking.

Let’s point out a small difference between tracking and measuring. Tracking is about generating all kind of information about an activity, measuring is about generating specific information to solve specific problems.

Two Scenarios

Tracking works when done automatically. These are machines environments.

Also, tracking works in high accountability environments, highly discipline, tightly planned futures. When you know exactly what you want to accomplish, how to accomplish it, you do it no matter what and there is someone to remind you to not flinch. These are working environments.

Any other scenario will produce inconsistent, inaccurate data that’s good for nothing.

Accomplishments

The practice is not trackable by design. You need high consistency in the activity being tracked so you can spot increments or decrements, but the practice is ever changing adapting to your needs. You need high consistency in the environment in which the activity is being tracked, but the practice can be done everywhere, any time.

Reverse the situation, ask why are you tracking the thing you are tracking. What goal are you trying to reach? What better outcome, hopefully, are you pursuing? Ask how you will know know you got there apart from some numbers on a piece of paper. Don’t fixate yourself with goals accomplished by a certain day, flow with the process and when you feel like you can do a new personal record, go for it. Challenge yourself, spontaneously, from time to time to gauge how are you doing.

Better results are a byproduct of the practice, not the reason you do it.