The point of personal tracking is to view totals or trends. Secondarily, tracking can help build your awareness of what you're doing in the present. But long-term tracking, the kind which has to be designed and organized, is for totals and trends.
Tracking takes non-trivial effort. Even if you have a system, it will take time to update and maintain unless it's entirely automated. Even if it is automated, either you have to maintain the automation as the world changes, or, in the case of external tools, you have to deal with the changes the tool will make while you aren't looking. It will be forever slightly wrong.
Don't setup tracking because you had a vague thought that it could be a good thing, do it because because you keep having a pressing need to know totals or trends. That need doesn't have tracking to manifest in a direct way, wanting to dismiss persistent uncertainty is as valid as having an external need for a hard number. But know what you want out of it.
Trends are for clarifying what you already know. You usually already know what the trends are, but may not be able to quantify when they started or exactly how drastic they are. Seeing concrete trends can get you the knowledge to get out of a rut, and faster than you might by yourself. The lag on a tracking system is better than the lag on your recollection, though both have limits.
Nothing beats a refined intuition in the moment. Tracking systems are a crutch to help you build them.
If you're avoiding something, a total is the bucket of cold water in the face which might get you to make change. It's easy to tell what something feels like on a small, everyday scale without realizing the long-term consequences.
Doing something once a week or twice a week feel nearly the same in the moment. The total will be different by 100%.
Totals are scary, multiply tiny discrepancies into massive issues. Be careful with them.
You don't live your life on the scale of totals, so don't reorganize your life around them. Obsession over totals is a terrible way to go out.
But the scare is why they're useful.
Setup tracking for both if you can, the bulk of the work is in the base tracking, not the analysis. Once you have the data, you may as well check. You never know what you might find.
But one of them should be your guiding light when you're assessing if something is worth tracking, or if the tracking system you have is actually the one you need.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
With the broadest possible definition of tracking, the amount of tracking in my life oscillates wildly from year to year. I've only just finally learned how to make it sustainable in the last few. I think it's been worth it. The knowledge is admittedly mostly novelty, not critical decision-making fuel or accountability material, but it brings me joy all the same.
I find myself perpetually bemused by the flavor of my past decisions, and yet I cannot deny the rationale behind them is one I would still follow.
Sometimes, I'm scared of getting sucked in. The world grows more tracked everyday, and not for the benefit of the people being tracked. People don't need this much precision to live life. I find myself adapting in slight ways to make things easier to track. The cardinal sin of all technically minded people is to prioritize the abstraction over the real.
Is the ideal outcome of tracking to discover novel insights waiting in the numbers for you? Or is it to look at them and see that your life is exactly as you experience it, that you have such honesty and perception that tracking is entirely redundant?
Is that even a reasonable dichotomy to propose?
- Rew