A Tracking System for Titans – Leverage Data-Driven Personal Development for Extraordinary Growth (WIP)

You are reading a work-in-progress draft (80%). These are published for the benefit of curious individuals.

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Mentions

“I’m going to share a tool with you that takes three minutes a day and will help anyone get better at almost anything. This sounds ridiculous, too good to be true?

Half the people who start doing this quit within two weeks, and they do not quit because it does not work, but because it does work. Get out a spreadsheet. Write down a series of questions that represent what is most important in your life could be friends, family, health etc. Every question must be answered with a yes, a no, or a number.”

Marshall Goldsmith PhD, Author and #1 World-wide Leadership Coach

“I wished to live without committing any fault at any time. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I ruled each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I had the satisfaction of seeing my faults diminish.“

Benjamin Franklin, Polymath

“At the end of every single day, I open a spreadsheet. I started creating a code, which is plus two, plus one, zero minus one, minus two [for each day]. I want more of the things that create the plus twos and less of the things that create the minus twos. But the difference that helped me is I know what they are.”

Jim Collins, Renowned thinker, writer, and researcher

“Habit tracking builds a series of visual cues. When you look at the calendar and see your streak, you’ll be reminded to act again. Habit tracking also keeps you honest. Most of us think we act better than we do. When the evidence is right in front of you, you’re less likely to lie to yourself. Habit tracking provides a signal that we are moving forward, and we become more motivated to continue down that path. Tracking feels rewarding.”

James Clear, Author of mega-bestseller ‘Atomic Habits’

“Tracking my personal key performance indicators (e.g., sleep, social quality time, feeling anxious or aversive) and connecting them to immediate actions when they don’t fall into the right spot is probably the single highest return-on-investment strategy I have found to increase my well-being. What is obvious in the context of company finances and strategy should also be deployed when you want to deliberately shape your life: measure what’s important and act on it”

Max Schons, Chief Medical Officer at Alvea

Summary

A core challenge is the development of accurate models related to the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of our growth efforts. Without an accurate self-model, we are likely to make poor growth decisions. Overcoming inaccurate models is a hard problem because our mindware has evolved to generate good models for survival but not for thriving in a complex world. Our cognitive biases (e.g., negativity bias, novelty bias, or recency bias) can easily lead to an inaccurate self-model. For instance, if you’ve been practicing the Pomodoro Technique for a month and enjoyed three productive weeks, a challenging final week might skew your perception. Due to recency bias, you could mistakenly conclude during your retrospective practice that the technique isn’t effective and abandon it.

The solution to these distortions is a Tracking System (or measuring and monitoring practice), which is a system of regular data collection and analysis designed to refine our self-model and guide more effective personal development decisions. It is one of the four essential components (referred to as the BIG4) of any goal-agnostic, cost-effective, and self-improving Personal Development System (PDS). The Tracking System brings evidence-based and data-driven qualities to the PDS, which are essential for developing an accurate model of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. This paves the path to effective personal development and empowers us to bridge the gap between our big ideas and intentions and tangible, real-world results. A well-designed Tracking System will enable us to improve our well-being, productivity, character, and skills more effectively by providing us with data-driven insights about the extent to which the PDS and each component/intervention are yielding sufficient return on the invested time and money. Over time, our intuition and explicit self-model should become more accurate.

Tracking helps to overcome our biases offering eight distinct benefits, each of which I describe in detail in this article:

• Understanding change over time
• Discerning relationships between metrics
• Prompting immediate actions
• Facilitating new habit formation
• Maintaining a sense of progress
• Achieving goals more frequently
• Improving the whole PDS
• Answering life-changing questions

I recommend the following 10-step process:

1. Define the Tracking System’s functions
2. Select starter metrics
3. Choose response scales
4. Pick a tracking format
5. Specify the time of the day
6. Pre-mortem the Tracking System
7. Relate neutrally and compassionately to tracking
8. Seek support
9. Clean up and update regularly
10. Take action based on insights

Each step is covered in great detail with specific advice.

In-depth case studies illustrate the nuances of setting up and utilizing a Tracking System. It delves into practical aspects like metric organization, color-coded feedback, and well-being measurement. The article also breaks down various metric categories, offering best practices for tracking different aspects of life, such as sleep, mental health, nutrition, exercise, well-being, and work.

Upon concluding this article, you will have a clear understanding of the potency of tracking and the steps to establish your own MVP of a Tracking System. Personally, the data, insights, and motivation gleaned from my tracking routine are indispensable for maintaining my performance and well-being. As you integrate this habit into your life, you’ll likely find it becomes an essential tool, making you reflect on how you ever managed without it.

Preface

In 2018, I reflected on my two-year coaching and five-year personal development journey and felt dissatisfied with the speed and magnitude of my progress. At that time, I had established basic versions of three out of four components of the BIG4. I had a wide range of mental models related to personal development and invested significant time and money into implementing them. However, I experienced only temporary increases above the baseline. Sometimes, I would regress entirely or just partially, and the modest long-term improvements seemed disproportionately slow. I found myself in the situation I described in the introduction to the BIRR series. There was something wrong with my PDS that prevented me from effectively translating big insights and ambitious intentions into tangible, real-world results.

I realized that I needed to be more consistent with the essential components of my PDS, aiming for 90% to 100% adherence, and being more effective in building new systems, habits, and routines. The solution I found to the consistency problem was Habit Tracking. I used a whiteboard on which I tracked five habits for only fifteen days. Little did I know that this seemingly innocuous decision would lead to profound changes in my life. From my career aspirations to my social interactions, tracking reshaped my perspective on what truly mattered to me.

I started to conduct lifestyle experiments that led to surprising revelations. For instance, I discovered that categorically saying no to social activities in the evening didn’t negatively impact my happiness as I had anticipated. Instead, I discovered that only high-quality social time with my closest friends mattered. This led to lifestyle improvements (e.g., consistent bedtime, evening routine, and wake-up time) that resulted in more energy, productivity, and social fulfilment. Over time, I developed a much more accurate model of the influences that impact different outcomes, such as my well-being and deep work hours. Moreover, the more I tracked, the more I could influence what mattered to me, and my once-humble spreadsheet soon escalated into a behemoth (see my case study).

Today, tracking has become a crucial meta-habit and element in my PDS. I’ve maintained my daily tracking religiously over the years, only pausing for retreats and similar low-tech experiences. This journey has cemented my conviction: effective personal development hinges on a robust Tracking System. It’s the missing piece that turned stagnating potential into significant progress.

Introduction

The power of tracking for self-improvement and personal growth has been recognized for centuries, as evidenced by Benjamin Franklin‘s pursuit of character development. He lived in an era very different from our own, where he helped to draft the American Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. He is still remembered as a great thinker, scientist, inventor, and politician. He was very serious about character development and used tracking and journaling as a means of monitoring and motivating himself toward his personal goals. He strove to live in accordance with thirteen virtues and each week would select a ‘virtue of the week’ to work on especially diligently. It took him thirteen weeks to work through the list, after which he would begin again, allowing him to cycle through each one four times a year.

Benjamin Franklin’s thirteen virtues 1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself, i.e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty. 9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation. 11. TRANQUILITY. Be not disturbed at trifles or at accidents common or unavoidable. 12. CHASTITY. Rarely indulge in sex unless for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation. 13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates. The accompanying image is a reconstruction of how Franklin’s journal could have looked based on his description in his autobiography.

To remind himself of his goals, Franklin carried virtue cards to check on periodically throughout the day. At the end of each week, he would review which virtues he had been successful with and which ones he needed to work on.

In the first week, my great guard was to avoid every the least offense against Temperance, leaving the other virtues to their ordinary chance, only marking every evening the faults of the day. Thus, if in the first week, I could keep my first line, marked T, clear of spots, I supposed the habit of that virtue so much strengthened, and it’s opposite weakened, that I might venture extending my attention to include the next, and for the following week keep both lines clear of spots. (p. 39)

I’m very confident that with his systematic and rigorous mind, Benjamin Franklin would probably love modern digital tracking. He eventually stopped his practice, and one wonders if digital tracking, with its many useful features, would have helped him to remain engaged and motivated to become more virtuous by giving him a greater sense of progress and direction. While he was certainly a great guy, but how much more awesome could he have become with proper tracking?

Numerous scientific studies^[1] have delved into the effectiveness of tracking as a tool for self-improvement, providing additional support to the case studies I discuss.

• Self-monitoring and goal-setting: Studies on self-monitoring and goal-setting have consistently shown that individuals who regularly track their progress tend to be more successful in achieving their goals in areas such as weight loss, physical activity, and stress management.
• Habit formation and behavior change: Research on habit formation has demonstrated that tracking helps individuals establish and maintain new habits. Tracking reinforces positive behavior by providing rapid feedback and encouraging corrective action.
• Productivity and time management: Studies on productivity and time management have shown that tracking can help individuals allocate their time more efficiently, prioritize tasks, and focus on high-impact activities. Regularly monitoring one’s time usage can lead to increased productivity and a better work-life balance.
• Well-being and mental health: Research on well-being and mental health indicates that tracking can help individuals identify patterns in their mood, stress levels, and overall mental health. By recognizing these patterns, individuals can take proactive steps to improve these outcomes.
• Sleep quality and health: Studies on sleep tracking have demonstrated that individuals who monitor their sleep patterns are more likely to implement healthy sleep habits and improve their overall sleep quality.

This article is not a literature review. If you are really interested in it, I encourage searching for the mentioned keywords on Google Scholar. Here are a few places to start [1], [2], and [3].

The studies underscore the potential of tracking as a powerful tool for self-improvement and should spark motivation to adopt tracking practices.

Conceptual Landscape

Let’s start by increasing our conceptual and analytical clarity. What is “tracking”?

Tracking is a system of purposeful regular data collection and analysis. You collect and record data for one or more metrics (also: variables, indicators, factors, influences, and outcomes) so that you can monitor the change reflected in the data and see the relationships between the metrics. For example, you could count the days spent in prison by making a vertical line on the wall or add an exotic stone to your collection for every week you avoid YouTube. Stones and walls have some disadvantages, so we might decide to use other means like paper or an electronic spreadsheet.

Modern technology has made tracking more accessible than ever before. From smartphone apps that monitor our sleep patterns to wearable devices that measure our physical activity, we have a wealth of tools at our disposal to help us gather valuable data about our lives.

Tracking is an essential tool that helps you move from big ideas to real-world progress and engage in data-driven personal development. You can use tracking to understand and improve outcomes, such as your well-being, productivity, and energy levels. It is easy and accessible, and after using it for a while, you might wonder how you ever lived without it.

Incorporating Qualitative and Quantitative Data

To effectively use tracking, it is essential to grasp the two main types of data: qualitative data (text) and quantitative data (numbers). Striking the right balance between quantitative and qualitative data in your tracking system is crucial for gaining a holistic understanding of your life. While numbers offer objective insights into patterns and trends, words and sentences can capture the emotions and context that make our experiences unique. Together, these two types of data provide a comprehensive picture that can guide our personal growth.

Some people might use tracking to refer exclusively to quantitative data collection and journaling to refer exclusively to daily qualitative data collection. Journaling can be seen as a niche format of tracking, which captures qualitative data. In their journals, people usually collect data in the form of sentences and words (i.e., qualitative data). It doesn’t matter much if the words are structured or a stream of consciousness.

From my experience, a rigid distinction between the two seems to do more harm than good. The most useful tracking will involve a mix of qualitative and quantitative data collection because this allows for a more potent generation of insights. For example, if you went to bed late, you might want to add a few words about why; these qualitative statements can help come up with interventions to make going to bed on time more likely. Without qualitative data, you would have some interesting numbers, such as how often you failed to go to bed, but you would be fiddling in the dark with regards to how to improve your bedtime consistency.

What are Potential Metrics?

Here is a short list of types of quantitative metrics you might want to track:

1. Psychological metrics: well-being, emotions, anxiety, energy levels, and more
2. Physical metrics: sleep, pain, sickness, nutrition, exercise, and more.
3. Social metrics: dates, conversations, conflicts, time with people, and more
4. Work metrics: hours worked, your perceived quality of work, and more
5. Habits or influences (e.g., meditation) that are intended to help improve your key outcome metrics (e.g., sense of presence)
6. Distractions: time spent online, on social media, on apps, and more
7. External factors: weather, location/country, season, and more
8. Progress toward specific goals

A few qualitative questions you might want to include in your tracking are:

• What emotions did I feel today?
• What challenges did I face today?
• How did I navigate the day?
• What made [quantitative metric] high or low today? Why not 5?
• Who did I talk to? What did we talk about?

The next key question is: how do we make sense of the relationship between the metrics in order to derive useful insights from the data?

Distinguishing Outcomes and Influences

In the context of tracking, it is important to discuss causality and correlation. We, humans, have theories about how things in the world are related to each other and what things might cause other things. Similarly, we have our own theories about how metrics are related to each other. We say, ‘these things/metrics cause these other things/metrics to change’ and make hasty assumptions about cause-and-effect relationships.

As we know, the relationship between two things can often be bidirectional, and much more complex if we look at causal chains over time, such as in longitudinal or time-series data. In practice, we do not have to fully understand the direction of the relationship and causality in order to be able to draw useful inferences from our data. For example, if you know that exercising leads to better sleep (because you exhausted yourself) or that better sleep leads you to do more exercise (because you feel more rested and have more decision power to do that exercise), then, in practice, your goal will be to improve your sleep quality and exercise together. It is often enough to just know whether a relationship exists or not. This can give you practical useful insight, without needing to try to figure out complex chains of causality, which might also be a futile effort.

Running high-quality n=1 experiments would provide stronger evidence for a causal relationship between one or more outcomes and one or more influences. General population experiments are okay evidence pointing toward a heuristical relationship, but these conclusions may not apply to you. High-quality experiments are costly and have other limitations, so tracking is a pragmatic and good alternative. Tracking provides you with enough heuristical evidence on the relationship between two or more things to derive action-informing insights.

It is still useful to model the relationships using some causal thinking. For this, I will introduce two terms ‘outcomes’ (or dependent variables) to refer to metrics you care about, you want to understand better, and you ultimately aim to influence, and ‘influences‘ (or dependent variables) for metrics that you expect to impact your outcomes. For example, your well-being (outcome) might be affected by the hours you slept last night (influence). As noted earlier, bidirectionality is real, which makes this a blurry working distinction that is imperfect but of important practical use. Depending on your theory, an influence can be an outcome and vice versa.

Psychological states are the outcomes we are most often interested in, such as feeling well, energized, motivated, feeling a sense of purpose in life, or feeling that your work is meaningful and impactful. These psychological states are often influenced by something external and observable, such as meditation reducing restlessness, but also by internal processes, such as thoughts, beliefs, and, most importantly, patterns of self-talk.

Heuristically speaking, observable behavior-based influences, like a daily meditation or journaling habit, tend to be easier to change than internal processes. However, be aware that the relationship between your behavior, cognition, and emotions is poly-directional. For example, daily gratitude journaling can change your self-talk, and cognitive restructuring techniques can change your behavior.

Tracking enables you to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t want, primarily by understanding the (causal or bi-directional) relationships between outcomes and influences and acting on those insights. For example, being tired or feeling anxious makes you more likely to spend time browsing the Internet at night, while going to bed early makes you feel less tired and anxious. With the awareness of this relationship, you use the implementation intention technique to change your behavior (e.g., “when I observe unusual levels of tiredness and anxiousness, then I will block all entertainment websites in the evening”).

I’m optimistic as I haven’t seen examples of people fooling themselves or drawing harmful conclusions. However, this doesn’t mean that it won’t happen, so make sure your insights consider relevant evidence and are empowering and infused with common sense.

Why? What are the Benefits of Tracking?

You might wonder why we need to bother with a formal tracking system. If it requires you to invest between five and twenty minutes daily, what benefits can you expect in return?

The answer is that tracking provides you with the information you need to build an accurate model of yourself. If you want to make improvements to your life, you need to have an accurate self-model.

Our default mindware has evolved to generate good models for surviving in a simple world but rarely great models for thriving in a complex world. For example, unless we have trained our minds, our default is that events of adverse and negative nature have a more significant impact on our well-being than events of a positive nature (see literature on our negativity bias). This is good for our short-term survival but bad for our long-term thriving (see literature on the relationship between positive emotions and important outcomes). Similarly, we are notoriously bad at remembering details accurately, holding various observations in our minds, and thinking nuancedly. Thus, we easily draw incorrect and unhelpful conclusions about cause-effect relationships.

You will not get favorable results if you predict the consequences of your actions inaccurately. We need good models about how much a valued outcome fluctuates and what is influencing those fluctuations to take actions that effectively improve our lives. Our mindware needs outside help to upgrade towards making us thrive in a complex world. Tracking is an excellent tool to do this job. It helps us to tap into our potential and manifest high levels of flourishing.

Below are eight powerful reasons why tracking is very much worth the time investment:

1. Gain insights into the fluctuations of outcomes in your life
2. Identify connections between different metrics to better understand their interactions
3. Encourage prompt action by recognizing areas in need of immediate attention
4. Enhance the establishment of new habits by setting clear and achievable targets
5. Foster a sense of progress by monitoring growth and development
6. Increase the frequency of goal attainment through consistent tracking and evaluation
7. Optimize your personal growth system by identifying strengths and areas for improvement
8. Empower yourself to address critical life questions through informed decision-making

Understanding how Outcomes Change over Time

The first purpose of tracking is to help us accurately understand how important outcomes, such as ‘work quality’ or ‘well-being’ change over time. To understand reality, we need to have accurate data, and it is very difficult to get this if we rely exclusively on our memory.

The first challenge is the recency bias. This is the tendency in our own minds to place the greatest importance on the most recent events. So, if your last few days have been ‘not that great’ you might be inclined to think, ‘The whole past month, I have felt really poor.’ In fact, the 25 other days of the month could have been great. We don’t accurately remember all the days and changes that came before the current bad feelings.

The second challenge is the intensity bias. This describes the tendency of our brain to give intense events greater importance in our memories than milder events. If you felt terrible on five days during the past month, this will stand out as your memory of the whole month, overshadowing the other twenty-five days where you might have felt good. Likewise, an unusual event or a few days that contrast sharply with what is normal will tend to be what you remember most vividly.

Taking these two biases into account, it is very difficult to get an accurate record of how one metric, like our own well-being, changes over time unless we track and record it each day. We cannot memorize it over enough weeks to be able to see useful patterns. Tracking is an ‘upgrade on our brains’, allowing us to collect data using tools and technology that do not have the limitations of our own minds. Tracking allows us to collect data and then examine it from a more objective perspective.

For example, you may be interested in your energy levels because you have noticed them changing in a way that you don’t understand. To begin understanding what is going on, your first step is to collect enough accurate data, recording a metric about your energy level each day. Once you have collected this data for a while, you will start to see how it changes over time, and this is when you can start looking for relationships that explain ‘why?’

Discerning the Relationships Between Metrics

The second purpose of tracking is to uncover the true relationships between metrics, enabling you to take action to influence one factor by optimizing another. Without tracking, you run the risk that your beliefs about what influences important outcomes might be flawed, and your actions to improve things will not be effective. You might have many entertaining pet theories about what made you feel bad and what you need to do to feel better. When wondering why you felt good one day, and low another day, you might decide it was the food you ate, a conversation you had, or the coffee that you drank.

The key challenge here is confirmation bias, which is the human tendency to search for, believe, and remember information that supports a belief that you already hold. When some new information goes against your existing belief, you are more likely to ignore or discount it. You prefer to search around for further information that confirms what you already believe or fits what you have already decided. For example, you might see yourself as a very social person, and believe socializing is what made you happy one day, but ignore the fact that an additional day of socializing had no, or negative, impact on your well-being. If you carefully track the data on both factors over enough days, you can update your view of yourself and make it more aligned with reality. You can uncover what truly explains your varying well-being. For example, it could be your degree of like-mindedness with those you spent time with that made you feel good.

To reveal the more accurate relationships between the influences and outcomes, we need to record these metrics accurately, over a length of time. Then we can start to see relationships and get useful insights. We might observe various unexpected relationships and nuanced patterns. You can use tracking to run n=1 experiments to test your hypothesis about a relationship by doing an intervention and observing the effect on outcomes of interests.

Continuing with the example we mentioned earlier; you are currently interested in your changing energy levels. You might have believed that the weather strongly influences your energy levels, and now you have collected data over the summer and winter months. The data might show this to be true, or it might show only a marginal influence, not as serious as you had thought. If the weather had little influence, this would help you to be less concerned about it, realizing that your energy is relatively independent of it, and you could look for more important influences. This could liberate you from the common cultural narrative around weather and energy levels. You could realize that most of the effects might be due to a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. We can test and transcend superstition, cultural artifacts, personal beliefs, and faulty memories by examining the high-quality data that we have collected.

Another interesting factor you may observe is how your awareness of something can lead to a placebo effect. You might observe that the weather has little impact on your energy levels on low weather-awareness days but has a high effect on high weather-awareness days. Coincidentally, you could observe that high weather-awareness days are those when you have slept poorly or when you need to work on a difficult task. Your mind uses the weather as a rationalization to procrastinate and to indulge in actions that provide immediate gratification. These truths might be uncomfortable in the short run but extremely valuable in the long run.

As can be seen in this example, tracking enables us to understand ourselves better, and not rely on popular theories that are sometimes useful but can more often be incorrect and disempowering. Tracking can help us distinguish between the things we can control and those we cannot control, and between factors that impact us and other factors that might have an unclear effect, like the weather. Tracking enables us to see for ourselves the true relationships affecting the things that we care about. The data we get from tracking is much better than the data our brains can collect and vastly better than relying on cultural stereotypes. The accurate data from tracking helps us to navigate our lives better. Tracking can help us to better understand what is influencing our mental state and behavior, and it allows us to intervene appropriately if necessary. In essence, a systematic and rigorous tracking system substantially upgrades our memories and enables us to live happier, healthier, and more productive lives.

Motivating Swift Actions

The third purpose of tracking is to motivate swift actions when there is a change in one of your key metrics. Tracking enables you to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t want primarily by understanding the (possibly causal or bidirectional) relationships between outcomes and influences and acting on those insights. For example, being tired or feeling anxious makes you more likely to spend time browsing the Internet at night, while going to bed early makes you feel less tired and anxious. With the awareness of this relationship, you could create an implementation intention that says, ‘when I observe unusual levels of tiredness and anxiousness, then I will block all entertainment websites in the evening.’

If you are tracking your well-being, what should you do if, for example, you see your levels of well-being decreasing over three days? Because of your tracking system, you can see the trend very quickly. You cannot deny it, because you have the data in front of you. You may have been recording your daily work schedule, which shows that you have been working very long hours – you realize that exhaustion from working so much is causing your well-being to decline. You can now swiftly decide if and how to intervene.

You have the chance to act rapidly to help yourself. You can decide to take some simple action to sustain your well-being at a higher level. Seeing the trend in the data might motivate you to focus on your fundamentals rather than defer to a short-sighted career goal.

On the other hand, you may feel you have to keep working on finishing a project, as your job has a high priority. You are then nudged to make a more deliberate decision, such as saying, ‘for the next two weeks, I am okay with my well-being being below four out of five.’ You can now monitor and understand what is happening. This is an informed decision and a trade-off and sacrifice that you have made deliberately with integrity.

Tracking nudges you towards a deliberate decision on whether you want to sacrifice your personal well-being for a professional goal which will help you feel a greater sense of integrity and internal alignment but also encourage you to make the decision with a longer-term perspective in mind. You have the data and high-quality knowledge needed to make meaningful interventions.

Boosting Implementation of New Habits

Consistency is essential for a new habit to form and for old habits to be maintained. In this sense, tracking can be seen as a meta habit for habit building because it helps you to be more consistent. Your tracking informs you when you are consistent and when you are not and encourages you to take swift action. This makes it much easier to follow key ideas like ‘never skip a habit two days in a row.’ For a daily habit, if you skip several days, the effort you have to exert to restart is as much as it was on day one of the habit building.

For example, if you are trying to develop the habit of meditating daily, your tracking will immediately give you feedback when you have skipped a day or two. Rather than leaving it until it is hard to start again, you can take swift motivated action. If you saw that you hadn’t meditated for four days, you would take more serious action. You can also discuss your tracking data with an accountability buddy to help you to come up with effective interventions.

If you decide to add a new habit to your life, you can add it as a new metric on your tracking sheet. You will be hoping that the new habit will contribute positively to your life, for example, by increasing your well-being or energy, or by helping you make progress towards one of your other specific goals. As the days pass, you will see whether the anticipated improvements are manifesting themselves or not.

Maintaining a Sense of Progress and Self-Efficacy

The implementation of a new habit can be very difficult, and many people ultimately give up before succeeding. It is not much fun, and it can seem futile to even try. You risk drifting into a low self-efficacy mode of believing that ‘habit building does not work for me,’ or ‘that specific habit is not for me.’ Tracking helps enormously here, as it vividly reveals your progress and your successes. Tracking makes it much more likely that you will successfully implement a habit, and it helps you to build the habit over the long run. This aspect of tracking is very valuable and can improve your self-image, affirming that you are able to make progress and implement new habits.

Without tracking, you struggle to achieve this data-driven sense of progress. Any progress is very unclear, and it is difficult to measure effectiveness. Sometimes a person will suffer from emotional pain because they feel a sense of stagnation, and they feel that the things they try do not work, that nothing sticks, and that there is no sense of progress. For a person who likes robust conclusions, this lack of data is very frustrating. In this case, tracking is an intervention that can alleviate these feelings. Tracking is not perfect, but it is much better than relying on your memory to judge the relationship between your new habit and your new level of well-being.

Tracking gives you robust long-term data, allowing you to see your progress over a long period. You can see if your average for an outcome is higher compared to a year ago, if you are doing more habits than last quarter, or if you are doing a habit on more days than last month. Tracking can help you to make actual progress towards your goals and allow you the fulfillment of seeing the progress reflected in the data.

Achieving Your Goals More Often

An interesting phenomenon relevant to tracking is the mere-measurement effect. Research shows that if you start measuring a metric, it will usually get better unless you have a specific personality profile (see later section on who might not benefit much from tracking). For example, if a person starts calorie tracking, the act of measuring will very often have a substantial impact on how much they eat. Likewise, if you start tracking your well-being, it will lead you to make better decisions, which will improve your well-being. Merely by tracking a metric, you make it more likely that it will improve. So, by adding your new habit to your tracking sheet, your motivation to implement it will increase. This simple but potent effect can help you achieve your desired goals.

Improving Your Whole Personal Growth System

Tracking has highly synergistic effects with other personal development activities and your whole self-improvement system. For example, tracking data can contribute to identifying the most promising topics for a coaching session, and coaching can contribute to helping you to understand what is working and what is not working in your current tracking format and to update it accordingly. In another instance, you could ask for feedback on high-impact growth areas (e.g., kind communication) and then design qualitative and quantitative metrics to motivate and monitor your progress (e.g., to what extent was my communication kind today? Where did I show kindness today?).

Enabling You to Answer Life-Changing Questions

We can appreciate the value of tracking by examining the types of important questions tracking data helps you to answer with some confidence:

• What decreases/increases/stabilizes this important outcome?
• Does this influence (e.g., meditation) decrease/increase/stabilize this outcome (e.g., sense of presence)?
• How can I decrease/increase/stabilize this outcome?
• Is this influence (e.g., dating) relevant/irrelevant for this outcome (e.g., well-being)?
• How much of this influence (e.g., sleep) is ‘optimal’ for this outcome (e.g., energy)?
• How many good/bad habits did I have X time ago?
• On how many days, did I do X (e.g., exercise) in the last years?
• How did my total and daily amount of this outcome (e.g., deep work) change over the last years?
• What is my normal/average/baseline of this outcome (e.g., sense of gratitude)?
• Did intervention with this influence (e.g., taking vitamin D) change this outcome (e.g., perceived sleep quality)?
• How different were the outcomes under lifestyle or weekly structure Y compared to Z?

The answers and insights can significantly change your life and how productive, socially impactful, and happy you are.

Case Study 1: Lifestyle Experiments To Discover Our Real Needs

You can use tracking very well to evaluate different lifestyle experiments (e.g., weekly structures). I vividly remember a lifestyle experiment at the beginning of 2019. I wanted to achieve ambitious professional goals and knew that I had to change my lifestyle more ruthlessly if I wanted to do a high number of focused, deep work hours seven days a week. I drastically cut down my evening social activities because they tended to disrupt ambitious daily and weekly structures. I decided that for six months I would always be home by 9 pm. Previously, I had socialized, dated, and partied several evenings a week (see his blog post on ‘romantic thriving life’). I was convinced that I needed these social activities in order to be happy and productive. I would’ve bet on the negative impact of this lifestyle change on my well-being levels. Moreover, I expected that it would be very difficult to stick to this new structure.

After five or six months of rarely socializing or going out – only about five times in total – the results in the data were surprising. I saw that the drastic reduction in partying, dating, and socializing did not have a lasting impact on my well-being. In fact, my well-being stayed constant and was a bit higher. I discovered that only high-quality social time, such as the time spent with my closest friends, impacted my well-being.

This lifestyle experiment helped me to update my model and beliefs about what matters in the social sphere of life for my well-being and productivity. With this knowledge, I was motivated to make radical changes to my life structure and live a professionally devoted life while investing my leisure time mostly in the most valuable social activities. This profound update was only possible because I tracked the true consequences of my lifestyle experiment. This led to a lasting conviction that prevents me from endorsing thoughts that try to sell me the benefits of dating, clubbing, or group social events.

Why don’t more people do tracking?

If tracking is so useful, why doesn’t everyone do it? There are several reasons:

1. Many people have not heard of tracking
2. Some are aware and capable, but not motivated enough
3. Some are aware and motivated but lack procedural guidelines on how to start
4. Some prefer blissful ignorance over uncomfortable yet ‘growthful’ and empowering truths
5. Some may feel an aversion towards data gathering, feeling that it sounds cold, or like difficult maths, having difficulty seeing tracking as a neutral system of simple observation
6. Some avoid it out of fear of experiencing negative feelings, such as guilt if they do not ‘succeed’
7. Some people have made the effort to start with tracking but didn’t receive the benefits and stopped
8. Some have an aversion to the effort of establishing the system, doing it, and updating it

My goal with this article is to address these hindrances and the lack of high-quality introductions and guides to tracking. Thus, people have difficulty getting a useful tracking system up and running. Tracking is, to some extent, psychologically complex, so it can be challenging to make progress without experienced and ongoing support and guidance.

There are several apps, like mood or habit trackers. People often tell me that they don’t find these apps useful and get very little benefit from this type of tracking, leading them to ultimately stop using them. Many apps offer less useful functionalities for more advanced users than a simple spreadsheet. They may prematurely conclude that all tracking is not helpful when it is just the specific app that they have chosen that is not suited to their needs. It is important not too hastily to generalize from trying a few systems of tracking to tracking in general. Different considerations for selecting a tracking system are discussed later.

Who might not benefit much from tracking?

Based on my experience, people with the following characteristics might not benefit much from tracking:

• Low self-compassion
• Low self-efficacy
• Low self-worth
• Aversion toward data, numbers, and spreadsheets
• High need for an aesthetic tool
• Believing in ignorance being bliss

It might be more valuable to start with therapy or coaching first before tracking. If you are curious despite some resonance with some of these characteristics, you may try to start tracking. In fact, tracking can be a powerful tool to help you change these tendencies. For example, you could record if you did a daily self-compassion meditation.

How to Start and Make Progress with Tracking

Specify Your Tracking Functions

The first step in getting started with tracking is to specify what you want to get out of tracking. When I work with my coachees, one of the first principles I introduce and apply everywhere with them is: ‘form follows function’. If you want to live a deliberate, deep, and thoughtful life, this is an essential ingredient.

So, think about what functions (or purposes, or value propositions) do you want tracking to fulfill?

They will help you design an MVP system (form) and remember that this is not set in stone and you will update it as usage data comes in around what is working and what isn’t.

A form that serves some of your desired tracking functions will help you to establish the tracking habit because the tracking activity will clearly be valuable to you. I recommend people use the following fill-in-the-blank syntax for the specification of functions, “The _ (tracking system) should ensure that I _”

• understand my well-being better (e.g., which influences contribute most to my well-being?)
• become healthier
• feel more energized
• know how much time I should socialize or work
• discover what increases my stress levels
• change my behaviors
• build better habits
• know to what extent I’m progressing toward my goals
• establish a tracking habit
• more”

Here are some heuristics for good functions

• Avoid mixing different levels of abstraction (e.g., help me do the most good for the world, live longer, and do 10 push-ups a day) and aim for a middle level of abstraction
• Make them motivating – If they feel unmotivating, ask yourself, “how can I make them juicier?”
• Use a verb at the beginning
• Refrain from nesting functions

It’s okay for starters to spend 5-20 minutes specifying your functions, and your functions may be the same, similar, or different from these examples. Different people will find different functions more or less important, based on their current life situation. Fulfilling your functions will help you to sustain a high level of motivation, progress, and self-discovery.

If you have tracking experience, but you never thought about the functions, then this is time well spent because it will help you evaluate how well your current tracking system is doing against your desired functions. I recommend the following framework for a system update:

1. Specifying the functions (and pains)
2. Describe your current system
3. Rating how well your current system is serving the functions on a scale from 1-10 (one general rating and then ratings for each function)
4. Brainstorming actions to get your current system to a 9 out of 10 generally and for each function
5. Scheduling time for actions and executing them
6. Reevaluating 3-6 months after the iteration (schedule it!)

Decide on Your Metrics

Once you have specified your functions, you can start thinking about which metrics would be promising to track. Your functions will already provide clues for metrics, but can also brainstorm with different prompts like

• What do I want to have more of in my life?
• What do I want to have less of in my life?
• What is very important to me?
• What do I care very deeply about?
• What personal or professional areas/goals/projects do I want to make progress on?
• What aspects of myself would I like to understand better and improve?

If you have no tracking experience, don’t be too ambitious or overly thoughtful when selecting metrics. I recommend making your main goal the formation of a tracking habit. Once the fundamental habit is established, you can add more metrics and do more fancy things.

The best is to start with between one and five metrics and track them for a month. It is wise to apply the ‘too small to fail’ heuristic of successful habit-building, to create a sense of progress and keep your motivation strong. Easy metrics, to begin with, are well-being, energy levels and sleep.

If you are a beginner, it is advisable to choose metrics that are unlikely to trigger guilt or negative feelings. Rather select metrics you feel good or neutral about until you have established the mindset of neutrally observing and recording the cold facts, without negative emotions.

For tracking beginners, this is also not the time to try to establish new habits. You are simply tracking and observing them, and you don’t have any goal around changing them. For example, don’t try to give up smoking or drinking at the same time as you start tracking, as the amount of willpower required is excessive, and your chance of failure will be extremely high. The metrics you choose should rather be existing factors in your life. The habit of tracking must be well established before you try to use it to initiate additional new habits. Trying to adopt several habits at once requires too much willpower, and you would be setting yourself up for failure. Only after a month (or even two) start thinking about actively changing things or adding habits.

Select the Response Scales

You will need a response scale for each metric. There are two types of scales:

• Number ranges: 1 to 5, -2 to 2, 1 to 10, and more
• A collection of (pre-defined) qualitative statements: ‘very positive’, ‘mildly positive’, ‘normal’, or ‘depressed’

Here are a few examples from myself and my coache

Construct	Responses						Comments
State	10-9 = actively great (not to be expected of everyday	8 = good, no concerns, if this was the constant level, things are good (GREEN)	7-6 = minor concerns (YELLOW)	5-4 = medium concerns (ORANGE)	3-2 = major concerns (RED)	1-0 = terrible	Whenever something is orange, it requires some thought/action. I really like this, makes it much clearer what the desired outcome is (always 8). Also makes it clear that you don’t need “bliss” for it to be a great day, just “no concerns” is good enough.”
Sense of connection	1 = not much connected	2 = a bit connected	3 = somehow connected	4 = well connected	5 = deeply connected to all being
Mental activity	1 = very low	2 = low	3 = moderate	4 = high	5 = very high		Measured during evening tracking
Responses to challenges	1 = you good bro?	2 = needs work	3 = okay	4 = good job!	5 = very nice champ!
Energy	1 = unusually low	2 = below average	3 = average	4 = above average	5 = unusually high		Average = I’m not bottlenecked by my energy to do things between 7 and 20
Daily Routine Quality	0 = no routine	1 = morning or evening routine only	2 = morning and evening routine,	3 = routines and deep work	4 = routines, deep work, and all habits	5 = routines, deep work, all habits, and all other goals for the day
Healthiness / Deviations	1 = mild sore throat	2 = strong sore throat	3 = mild whole body unwellness	4 = moderate whole body unwellness	5 = strong whole body unwellness
Deep Work Effectiveness	1 = low	2 = normal	3 = high

A few heuristics

• Max/average: If you have optimized a metric a lot (e.g., energy or well-being), then you can consider the normal/average state as good or you see the average as a point close to the max point of the scale.
• Experimentation: You might not have a great intuition around the metric-response scale fit, so start honing your intuition by trying different response scales for each metric and see which provides a higher value. Similar to metrics, it is important to change a response scale if it doesn’t provide good value. Details matter, a lot.
• Academic literature: You could also look into academic literature if a metric you are interested in has been measured with one item. This can take some considerable time, so you need to have confidence that the metric is really important.

Overall, you won’t find many answers in the academic literature as to which response scales might be better. The work that examined this question is very minimal, so you have to rely again on your intuition and what other people found useful.

Select a Tracking Format

Once you have decided which metrics you want to track, the next decision is to select your (first) experimental tracking format. Again, I recommend thinking about the principle of ‘form follows function’. Start small, keep it simple, and don’t overthink it.

Physical tracking

For starters, I would recommend physical tracking because it is a very easy way to get started. You can select a notebook, a piece of paper, or a whiteboard. All these physical tracking options have their advantages and disadvantages. It is fine to do your tracking on paper, but an A4 sheet is generally too small. I advise using electrostatic whiteboard film, which is akin to a whiteboard but more easily removed and transported. You can stick this onto any wall, easily peel it off, and keep it in your luggage. A big benefit of this tracking form is the high visibility, reminding you to carry out your daily tracking. Place the whiteboard paper onto a surface that you see many times a day (e.g., your door). The goal is to build your tracking habit and to have strong visual feedback on your progress. Later, you can use digital tracking and this sheet to boost one particular habit on its own.

Physical tracking is ideal if you don’t feel comfortable with electronic devices, or you don’t like to use electronic devices in the evening. The disadvantage of paper is that the identification of relationships is very limited, namely to the space of the paper. This makes data analysis difficult. As you progress with tracking you may find you want to move to a digital format.

Digital tracking

Again, you have different options to do tracking digitally. Generally, there are two categories: Excel/Google Sheets or apps focused on a particular tracking metric (e.g., habit trackers, time trackers, or mood trackers). I would advise against mobile apps, as they have low flexibility (e.g., only track a few metrics with fixed response scales) and customizability (e.g., you can’t do your own calculations), and can be clumsy and slow due to the small screen and lack of a keyboard.

Overall, remember that you can and certainly will change your tracking format, so don’t expect it to be perfect from the start. Your intuitions around which metrics and design considerations are useful will develop over time as you gain more hands-on experience with tracking. Accordingly, your tracking system will grow with you over time.

Track Every Day

It is vitally important to make your tracking a daily habit. Do your tracking every single day. This should be a non-negotiable for you. If you stop and start, you will not get the benefits of the process, because your data will be incomplete. If you do find that you are struggling to keep going, perhaps you have made your system too complex. You might need to reduce the number of metrics you are tracking or think of a reward system for yourself if you track consistently for a certain number of days.

What time of the day is best?

Generally, people find that doing their tracking in the evening is the most convenient and most beneficial. This is when the details of your day are still fresh in your memory. Tracking can help you get closure for the day, and be part of your evening routine. Some people can do their tracking in the morning, as they have evening activities, or they are very short of time in the evening. In either case, make a consistent time for your tracking each day, to fully establish the habit.

Pre-mortem Challenges to Tracking

Spend a bit of time thinking about what has helped you to implement habits in the past, and make use of that knowledge. Also, think about what obstacles you have had in the past when implementing a new habit. Think about what obstacles might prevent you from implementing your tracking going forward. Decide in advance what strategies or solutions you will use to address those challenges if they come up. This will make it much more likely that you will stick with your tracking and get meaningful results from it (If you are familiar with the WOOP method or “Murphyjitsu”, you can use it here).

The First Month

Your main task for the first month or so is to implement the habit of tracking. You need to get into this new habit, and this might be a little bit difficult for many people. Getting your tacking going by being very consistent in doing it every day is really important.

At the same time, don’t expect too much value from the tracking system in the first few weeks. This time is mostly a time of practicing and developing your tracking, and the value will come later. In this foundation time, you will gradually learn and understand what metrics are useful and relevant to you, and you can gradually make changes and iterations. Be patient and ask other people who are more experienced in tracking for advice. A life coach will be able to give you support with this.

Be Neutral and Compassionate

When you are entering your daily tracking data, it is very important to do this without emotion or judgment. Be a scientist collecting data, stay logical and neutral, and don’t draw conclusions or become emotionally affected by the data you are writing down.

Be compassionate with yourself, and don’t feel guilt. It is very normal to be inconsistent and sometimes fail, especially early on with a new goal. Be accepting and realize that is unrealistic to expect too much. Be okay with it, and accept that it takes a lot of effort, practice, and time to implement a new habit. This applies when you start off with tracking, and, as you go forward, using tracking to make positive changes in your life.

Later, when you analyze the data, you can be emotional, and you can use the emotion as a motivation to change your habits if this is required.

Get support

Get support from those around you. If you have other people involved, social accountability can be very helpful to your tracking. If you have a life coach, they will work with you if they see that you need help with your tracking. Likewise, if you keep your partner informed about your tracking and coaching, if they see that your well-being is going down or your habits are changing, they can talk to you about it. It is difficult for those close to you to support you if they don’t have enough information, so it is important to discuss your tracking with them if you want their support.

Clean up and update your tracking

It can be difficult to anticipate how useful a metric really will be, and metrics can become less useful over time. If a metric does not add value after a month, or stops adding value, hide it on the spreadsheet. This will help you declutter your page, freeing up page space and mental space.

Likewise, if you feel you have more metrics than you can handle at the moment, you can collapse and hide some of the rows in your spreadsheet, and be able to concentrate more on the remaining visible metrics.

Moving Forward – Taking Action, Implementing Other Habits and Progress Towards Goals

Once you have established the habit of tracking, you can gradually move forward to use it as a powerful tool to improve aspects of your life, implement new habits, and achieve goals. You can make sense of what is happening in your life, intervene when a problem is developing, and optimize things that you care about. Once you have this fundamental meta-habit established, it will make gaining other new beneficial habits much easier. It is a meta-tool that will help you to implement other tools, which, in turn, will improve your well-being.

Case Study 2: My Tracking Journey

In this section, I discuss my tracking journey and share what has worked for me and what has not worked. I show how my tracking system has evolved and changed. I also draw on my observations as a life coach, having helped +20 people to establish their own tracking system. I hope this will help someone new to tracking to move forward with the new habit.

How did I Get Started? Whiteboard Tracking

In 2018, I reflected on my two-year coaching journey and felt dissatisfied with the speed and magnitude of how my big insights, ideas, and goals were translating into real-world progress. While I experienced temporary increases above the baseline, they didn’t stick, or it took a long time for them to stick. Sometimes I regressed fully, sometimes only partially. I realized that I needed to be more consistent with the key habits and routines (aiming for 90% to 100%) while also being more effective in building new habits.

I began my tracking journey by using a whiteboard. I initially planned to track five metrics for fifteen days using a very simple table. But I didn’t stop, and after continuing for about six months, I had established my tracking habit quite strongly. Despite starting in a very simple way, I have completed my daily tracking every evening without a break since then, except for a few days while on a mediation retreat without any electronic devices. I estimate my tracking consistency to be about 95% between then and now.

Physical tracking was very important because it prepared me for the next step of digital tracking. The disadvantages of physical tracking became practically relevant as I became proficient in habit formation, and I wanted to use tracking as a tool beyond the function of habit formation. My whiteboard had become overpopulated and lacked any data analysis functions like past performance (e.g., average deep work hours or well-being in 2017).

Moving to a Digital Format – OneNote Table

The first digital format was very interesting because it was highly social, which in the later versions wasn’t an important element. The social element helped to sustain the motivation by feeling more accountable, committed, and supported. Together with my peer coach and one of his own coachees (shoutout to Henning and Jan), we started tracking together using OneNote, a

simple and flexible social digital note-taking application.

We did the following actions

• Gave this form a motivating title, namely ‘Tracking Greatness’
• Specified the attitude we wanted to have towards ourselves and others (i.e., light-hearted, compassionate, honest, truthful, and supportive)
• Create a simple table for each of us

By then, I was quite ambitious and felt able to manage about 22 ‘very nice’ metrics and 5 ‘beast mode’ metrics, including several metrics about sleep, mediation, practicing Spanish, doing deep work, journaling, coaching, and several metrics on blocking distracting apps.

Interestingly, these are very similar to the metrics that I still use today. Here are screenshots of six days from my OneNote spreadsheet, from October 2018. I selected metrics that:

• Were highly relevant to my life.
• I would expect to benefit from tracking.
• Were not a gimmick or a ‘nice to have’.
• Needed to have stronger reasons than ‘I’m supposed to track X because so-and-so tracked X.’

A general pattern of how my metrics emerged is from either;

• Something I wanted to have less of in my life (e.g., particular problem and pain) or
• Something I wanted to have more of (e.g., focus, speaking better Spanish, stable daily structure and routines).

Coaching was very useful for the discovery and solution process. It helped me to discover areas of potential improvement with high expected value, and it helped me to design approaches and interventions which I expected to be highly effective in helping me to make progress.

As I paid more attention to my life and kept pursuing ambitious goals, I kept facing new ‘growthful’ challenges (e.g., discovering a personal shortcoming, like being low on patience in certain situations). Tracking and coaching have been one of my most effective tools to make progress on these challenges by requiring me to translate greater levels of insight and awareness into behavioral change. While coaching gave me insight into the problem and solutions, it would have been hard for me to implement everything without tracking. For example, getting the appropriate amount of sleep is a goal that is extremely important to me, and it was difficult for me to reach a high level of consistency. This is why I started to track my sleep, using several different metrics (see Figure 1). You will notice that I didn’t always achieve my goal, but it’s important to start recording to understand your current level of consistency and what factors are influencing it. It is important to have realistic expectations for ourselves, especially early on. I observed that there were specific apps and websites that had a high rate of overuse, so I decided to use software to block them at an appropriate time before bed. This resulted in a great increase in wake-up time consistency.

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I put some of my more ambitious metrics into a category I playfully called ‘Beast mode’, later changed to ‘Epic Hero’. These are things I wanted to have, but they were not ‘must-haves’ at that stage (see Figure 2). I did not achieve these goals during the example days, which is okay. They are long-term goals that I could ‘stretch’ towards. Having two (or even three) different levels of aspiration can give one more ambitious goals to work towards, without having to feel bad about not yet being there.

When I am coaching someone, I help them to identify issues that are very personally relevant to themselves. For example, if they find themself doing emails first thing in the morning instead of working on the most important tasks, they might want to start tracking whether they cleared their emails the evening before, whether they blocked emails in the morning, and whether they, in fact, did emails in the morning and whether that was reasonable.

You have to infuse high importance into each metric, so that you will be motivated to track them properly for an experimental period. For example, you might want to record how many academic papers you read, while someone else might want to record how much time they spend with their partner. The only wrong is to track things that are not aligned with the life goals you value a lot. From my experience, morning routines and evening routines are extremely important, so I recommend deliberately designing those (see this post for how) and starting to track them daily.

Moving to Excel – End of 2018

As I gathered more data, I wanted to analyse it. However, I found you can’t do this in OneNote; so I moved, three months later, to an Excel spreadsheet. Later, I moved all of my spreadsheets to Google Sheets because of some functional benefits.

Below is a screenshot of a week from my spreadsheet, from January 2019. You can also find all the spreadsheet excerpts here. When I moved to Excel, I made a couple of important changes:

• More qualitative, journal-type questions
• Colors
• Counters
• Averages

Metrics

I had qualitative and quantitative metrics, like journal-type questions, such as, ‘What things caused displeasing emotions today?’ and ‘How did you react to them?’ or comment on the possible cause of the day’s high or low well-being level. It’s important to go through an organic evolution process because it will help you understand the reasoning behind every element in your tracking and find out which elements provide you with value. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be inspired by other people, but rather that you want to be deliberate, agentic, and self-directed to hone your own intuition and understanding. This is why it is important to start small, and gradually build up your spreadsheet. Moreover, an attempt to start or copy a very elaborate system will very likely fail because you will have difficulty understanding and capturing the value of the different elements. In this case, you would most likely find that maintaining the tracking habit was very demanding, with a poor cost-benefit ratio.

Colors

I found it hard to differentiate metrics according to their importance and also difficult to understand whether or not I was being successful, so I started to use color to indicate these concepts. For example, whenever I scored more than ‘4’ for deep work, the cell became green via the conditional formatting rule I created. The cell became red for any smaller value. If I completed my daily Spanish lesson, I put in an ‘x’, and the cell turned green or it turned red for ‘/’.

Notice the colors of the habit-name blocks, designating ‘good’, ‘nice to have’, ‘must-have’, and ‘excellent’. Looking back now, the colors are not completely logical, and I can’t quite remember how they worked. This shows how my system has evolved, and I don’t think I need to feel stressed or embarrassed that it was not perfect. I use color as a tool to prioritize and keep the relative importance of the habits in mind, and to help me to know where to focus right now. As with all aspects of your own tracking spreadsheet, your colors will develop and evolve.

On this version of my spreadsheet, there is a column for a ‘target amount’ for each metric and a ‘frequency of days’ column. Then there is a column for each day of the month, where the metric scores are recorded. I also use colors for grading the scores. The color indicates whether or not I met the ‘target amount’ goal. I find that this color coding helps me to grasp the metrics, and the pattern of colors is a form of feedback.

Counters

At the top of the sheet are counters for my key habits for the month. I find these kept me motivated and gave me a clear view of how I was doing that month. For example, for the month in the screenshot, I had meditated 27 times so far and kept my journal for 28 days. I also keep counters and percentages for the year, so, for example, by the end of the year, I might know I had meditated on 80% of the days. I find this motivates me, as I can compare one year to the next, and see my progress. For me, knowing my hours of deep work over a year, and from year to year, is satisfying, and motivating. Each person must find the counters that are relevant and motivating for them.

Let me reiterate that, just like each person must find their own metrics, each person must find their own spreadsheet layout and colors and numbers. Do not compare your system to another person’s system. Labeling is also a key issue, (in tracking and in other areas of life), and I used the label ‘absolute beast’ to name a metric I found particularly motivating. Remember that your tracking does not have to become as elaborate as mine. It is fine to just stay with five or ten metrics and keep things simple for the long term – whatever works for you.

End of 2019 (Iteration 2)

At the end of 2019, I reviewed the year and planned the next year. As I did this, I saw ways of making my tracking more useful from a yearly perspective. I came up with several other good ideas when I examined the full year of tracking. You can also find all the spreadsheet excerpts here.

I made the following updates:

Research deep work

My ‘BIG 1’ for 2020 was to become really good at research and produce tangible achievements to unlock top promising Ph.D. programs. To break this vague outcome goal down, I specified a process goal that I wanted to hit, which was 1,000 hours of research deep work and a stretch goal, ‘absolute beast’, of 1,425 hours.

Time Left

There are ‘Days Elapsed’ and ‘Time Left’ blocks, recording how much of the year has passed. I find these motivate me by giving me a sense of urgency.

Well-being

There are well-being fields including both quantitative records (1 to 5) and longer qualitative comments. These were both new at this stage of my tracking, and I was not yet tracking average well-being.

Additional rows – The well-being fields have a status of ‘DV’ meaning ‘dependant variable’, as they were key outcomes for me at this stage.

Sleep expanded – There is a large set of sleep metrics.

New metrics and titles – There are metrics for presence (meditation), exercise, nutrition and supplements, productivity, loving-kindness, perspective (journaling and coaching), social connection, skill (Spanish), finance, and professional (deep work and lessons learned). Note that and fields for the metrics that I wanted to track more thoroughly, such as deep work, skills, finance, leave, professional and diet, are more comprehensive than they were in the previous spreadsheet.

More commenting – There is space for qualitative comments on deep work and social connections.

Weekly and Yearly Deep Work (DW) – I also recorded data on my deep work time each week, as this was very important to me at that time. I kept an average for each week going through the year, showing my progress in this area. I also kept a total for the year and used additional fine-tuned metrics and calculations to motivate myself further to do the hours of deep work I wanted to achieve.

December 2020 (Iteration 3) and Jan 2021 (Iteration 4)

Here are screenshots from my spreadsheet from December 2020 and January 2021. You can also find all the spreadsheet excerpts here. I did minor updates to my spreadsheet all through that year. At the end of the year, I decided to do a bigger update based on the yearly perspective and my experience from the last year of tracking. The end of the year is a good time because adding new analytics or changing the design takes time.

The tracking spreadsheet is a living document, and it evolves. Sometimes changes are improvements, and they stay on the sheet. Other times, the changes aren’t successful and fade away.

Dec 2020:

January 2021:

Life roles

In 2022, I developed what I call my personal life ontology, which slices my life up into life roles. I used this perspective to define my outcome and process goals (read more about this model here). I wanted to mirror this way of thinking about my life in the tracking system, so I structured the metrics around the roles. I also made specific metrics around specific goals for the year. I defined predictive variables and outcome variables and set targets for well-being.

Tracking in Action

I would like to share an example of when my tracking system has helped me to identify the cause of poor well-being, and the flow of action that I used to improve my life.

1. In the screenshot below from December 2020, notice how my well-being is good (5 out of 5) for several days, with a comment in ‘qualitative well-being’ that I had made good progress
2. But the following day, my well-being suddenly became worse (4 out of 5).
3. See how I went to bed very late the night before
4. I already know that going to bed and missing sleep often negatively impacts my well-being, and this reinforced my understanding of the relationship
5. I can use my spreadsheet to identify why I went to bed late – was I on a date, watching entertaining content, or shopping on Amazon?
6. I identified that watching entertaining content was the problem, so I decided to intervene and take action
7. The action I take is to use blocking software to restrict access to websites and apps with entertaining content
8. Some actions can be taken straight away, as soon as you notice the problem-cause relationship. For example, a blocker on your phone can be activated in a few seconds. Other actions might need to be planned, or reviewed and discussed. If you don’t know what the solution is, you could discuss it with your coach, and get help working out a good intervention

Notice that my poor well-being was traced back two steps, first to poor sleep, and then to the cause of the poor sleep. As your tracking spreadsheet evolves, you can start adding metrics that you think might be the causes of the problems in other metrics. Once you have collected the data, you can examine it to find the patterns.

2022 (Latest Iteration)

Here is a screenshot from the 2022 version of my spreadsheet. You can also find all the spreadsheet excerpts here. See how I have shifted from ‘topic categories’ to ‘roles’. The roles make my tracking more fun and active:

• Mental Well-being Caretaker.
• Sleep Guardian.
• Moral Training – Becoming More Saintly.

The Importance of the Well-Being Metric

Well-being is extremely important, and that’s why I have discussed it in many of the examples. Apart from the intrinsic value of feeling well, it also impacts how productive you are, how friendly you are to others, and how long you live. If you are not sure that well-being really does affect your productivity, you can track it to prove or disprove whether this applies to you. Understanding what contributes positively and negatively to our well-being, and what doesn’t, will help us lead happier, more connected, and impactful lives.

In my research work, I studied how well-being is conceptualized and measured by researchers. Some of these ideas are useful to understand a ‘simple’ well-being measure, that we might want to use in our tracking. As it is an elusive concept, it is important to carefully select and update it based on how you feel your engagement with it is going.

Before selecting the metric, you need to ask yourself

• What would be a practically useful definition of well-being for me?
• What scoring range do I want to use?
• What response scale do I want to use?

I have tried, and seen my coachees using, different types of

• Labels and conceptualizations (e.g., well-being, hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being, mood, happiness, meaning.)
• Scoring ranges (e.g., 1-5, 1-10)
• Response scales (e.g., 5 = ecstatic; 5 = a lot of positive emotions and little negative emotions; 5 = navigated the day well)

Especially the first and third questions lead to wildly important and consequential decisions. The theoretical nature of well-being is highly contested, and there is no empirical research on the practical benefits of the different constellations, so you need to rely on your own experience and the experiences of perceptive others. It might certainly be good to at least understand the distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Hedonic well-being is usually conceptualized and measured by the ratio of positive to negative affect and general life satisfaction, while eudaimonic well-being is conceptualized and measured by dimensions, such as the feeling of purpose and meaning in life, sense of environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, autonomy, and self-acceptance (Ryff’s psychological well-being model of eudaimonia).

I’ve seen

• People only use metrics related to the hedonistic conceptualization of well-being (i.e., mood specified by feeling positive emotions throughout the day, with a lack of negative emotions).
• Others only use eudaimonic metrics, like the sense of personal growth and fulfillment, regardless of the amount of daily positive or negative emotions.

Often people are not aware of their model of well-being. I would recommend a mixed approach with a much stronger focus on increasing the eudaimonic metrics because they are more stable than emotions and can drive positive character development more strongly.

I have used different well-being metrics throughout my tracking journey.

• What I found to be the most constructive and empowering conceptualization of well-being for personal tracking is to re-conceptualize it as ‘how well did I navigate life today?’ This is what I care most about on any given day and what I want myself to work on because you have little control over what happens in life and whether you feel good or bad (e.g., a cherished family member dies). However, you have control over how you respond to those things, and you can get better at it. Better doesn’t mean always getting back to a positive state quickly. It can mean using challenging situations as opportunities to contemplate deeper truths of human existence for some time instead of rushing through them. The question is great because it leaves subjective and personal judgment open. If you are able to re-conceptualize your internal evaluation of the day to be aligned with this prompt, then you will experience and cultivate a more profound underlying sense of contentment, regardless of the challenges or blessings that were sent your way. Additionally, you want to add a comment that you always need to respond to if you don’t give the maximum score to learn more about how to navigate life better. Never waste a ‘bad’ day.
• I have unpacked the ‘challenge’ dimension from this question further by asking myself:
  1. What was the level of challenges today? (1-5)
  2. How did I respond to them? (1-5)
  3. A qualitative comment
• In general, I try not to be concerned about feeling lots of good emotions. Instead, I want to recondition myself to feel positive if I coped well with a challenge, and to feel bad if I didn’t cope well with an unpleasant event.
• Another metric, which is an exercise that has the same purpose, is the ‘dichotomy of control exercise.’ Here I try to find at least one challenging moment from the day and apply the framework to it, namely distinguish between what was in my control and what was out of my control in a given situation.
• Sometimes people can upset you, which gives you negative emotions that you struggle to navigate. If you can cope with these negative feelings well, when you look back at the end of the day you can feel content about it, and it does not need to lower your well-being score. Preventing yourself from getting agitated about something you don’t control is a win, and can make you feel content despite the challenge.

Let me give an example, thinking about my previous few days’ tracking records, with a screenshot below:

• On the previous day, I worked on an extremely important topic in coaching and made great progress with it. I felt really good about this and scored my well-being as 5.
• On a day earlier that week, I had given my well-being a rating of 4.5. I recorded the reason for this as being because I took a comment by another person too seriously. In the evening when doing my tracking, I felt that I hadn’t fully resolved the issue, and the negative feeling was still lingering with me.

How and When I Do Tracking and other Heuristics

I do my tracking every day in the evening as part of my evening routine, which starts with 10-30 minutes of reading followed by 30 minutes of journaling and 20 minutes of tracking and ends with 15-30 minutes of meditation. I have always done tracking in the evening.

The tacking usually does take about 20 minutes. It may take a bit longer if my mind is active because my mind might start to wander around. I try to only invite associative thinking during the separate time that I allocate to journaling, but it might still happen during tracking, especially with the more journal-like questions.

If I am feeling very tired, I will work through the tracking more quickly. Occasionally, if I am exhausted, I might just record the most important issues, and skip over the qualitative statements, although this is rare. But I never skip a day completely, even if it is 2 am. Even if it is 5 am, I still do tracking before sleeping, and I never leave it for the next day. The only time I skipped any days in 2021 and 2022 was when I was on a meditation retreat where electronics were forbidden.

It is crucial to remember that if you allow yourself to leave tracking to the next day, this can very easily and quickly become a habit. Evening tracking can bring closure to the day, and the new day should start with your usual morning routine, without needing to attend to unfinished and forgotten tasks from the previous day. This helps you to navigate your new day feeling more empowered because you don’t need to deal with a personal shortcoming early on in the day. If you want or need to do tracking in the morning or at a different time of the day, the same principle applies with regard to maintaining consistency and discipline in doing tracking during the desired time.

It is okay to sometimes go through your tracking more quickly, because you had a particularly rough day, or your mind is very active. In these instances, I record my most important metrics and then skip the more journal-like metrics. You can also create a designated MVP/short version by using colors for those key metrics. However, you should pay attention that this is not becoming your default mode of tracking, as you risk your tracking becoming sloppy and less valuable. If you sense this happening, you have to make more effort to complete all your important metrics.

How I Guide my Coachees with Their Tracking

When I introduce the idea of tracking to a coachee, I suggest that they think carefully about what pains they are experiencing, that they would like to feel less of, and what they want to have more of in their lives. Only after they have thought carefully about these questions can they move on to the next question, which is: how can tracking support them in getting more of the good things they have identified, and less of the undesirable ones?

When choosing metrics, I remind them not to just jump to ‘Oh, that would be a cool metric to track!’ Each person has their own priorities, and these often include

• Less negative self-talk, less stress, and less anxiety
• More well-being, a greater sense of connection, more presence, and more gratitude

I advise them to track the metrics that will bring the most value. There is little value gained by tracking something you are already happy or good with – if you already feel a lot of gratitude, then don’t waste effort tracking that. Focus on items that are bringing you pain. Things you feel enthusiastic about improving in your life are also good candidates for tracking. You might brainstorm quite a long list of potential metrics, but it is best to choose your key factors to begin with and enlarge your list later once tracking is established.

Here is an example of a tracking sheet I helped one of my coachees develop. As they were working on it with my support, they were able to start with quite a high number of metrics. Most people should start with fewer metrics. The upper rows have the coachee’s chosen outcome metrics, and below those are the influence metrics to do with sleep, mental health, physical health, work, and recreation. The columns are the dates.

This coachee became a C-level leader, and one of their important growth areas is dealing with stress. One of their identified pain points was that they felt stressed at work because of growing new responsibilities. They wanted to monitor their stress levels and keep their stress in check.

Another pain point was that, as a person with very high standards, they experienced a decent amount of agitation throughout the day. So, the outcome you see of ‘functional emotional response’ refers to whether they had responded calmly despite being agitated.

Sleep

Optimize key influences – We worked on identifying which influences affected their stress and emotional management. As is often the case, we identified sleep as being very important. Both quantity and quality of sleep were relevant. Sleep appears to be a key influence, impacting many outcomes for my coachees, and is usually one of the first metrics I discuss with them. Having thorough sleep tracking to understand how your sleep works will provide a lot of value. You can calculate your number of sleep hours, but the more subjective sleep quality score is also very important. Without tracking, many people do not have a good sense of how many hours of sleep they get, or what is disturbing their sleep. If you have a device that measures your sleep cycles and REM sleep, this can give you additional information, although I don’t find this very important.

Work on second-order influences – It is essential to examine influences of influences to understand and then change chains of causality. In the case of sleep, it is important to create a good model of which influences affect the time that you go to bed, which usually impacts your wake-up time. Two common causes are overworking and overstimulation. I work together with many highly ambitious people, which can and want to work a lot, and it is important to remind them that ‘should do’ does not follow from ‘can do’ and ‘want do’. Working too long can strongly impact sleep quantity and quality, which can have serious negative short-term effects on the next days’ performance and well-being and undesirable long-term effects like burnout. Most coachees experienced strong benefits from a more rigid work checkout, bedtime, and wake-up time. However, most need to intentionally redesign their physical, social, and digital environment to achieve good compliance. This coachee tracks whether their phone is out of their bedroom and that blocking is activated on their phone and laptop in the evening to decrease pre-bed levels of stimulation and mental activity. With tracking, you see the relationship between your blocking actions, your sleep metrics, and your outcome metrics.

Capture causes of poor compliance – I recommend that if you track, for example, your waking time, you can also have a space to record the reason for any deviation, such as why you overslept. If you record these reasons, you can gather accurate data about what actually causes the deviations, and take steps to improve the problem. As time passes, you will get a better understanding of what is causing sleep disruptions. You can decide to become more consistent about going to bed on time, and you can decide to find effective ways to reduce the distractions that keep you up.

Clarify what happens after you wake up – I found in my own tracking that when I had an afternoon nap, it took me quite a while to get back to work. I thought it might be worth tracking. Before I started tracking, I estimated the time to be 20 to 30 minutes, but tracking revealed that the range was rather between 30 to 60 minutes. I was surprised and motivated to take action to return to work within 15-20 minutes, so I started tracking if I was successful and what prevented me. I designed different interventions based on the incoming data to reach at least a success rate of 80%. Without tracking, I would have spent 3.5 to 7 hours every week fooling around. The same ideas apply to the time after wake-up. I work a lot with my coachees on that and the design of the morning routine.

Specify quick interventions – When you observe an unreasonable deviation from your goal, then it can be very helpful to have an immediate intervention specified. A useful syntax is: “IF x, then Y”. For this coach, he implemented a financial disincentive: IF sleep deviation was unreasonable, THEN pay 20€ to person X. You can use all sorts of interventions, like IF stress > 4/5, do a long walk or meditate for one hour tomorrow.

Social Media

Cultivate awareness – Another growth area for many of my coachees is their engagement with social media and communication apps. If you start tracking this and find that you spend, for example, an hour on Twitter every morning, this awareness might lead you to decide to change things. It is not that you are forced to change, but that the awareness of the facts, and what you have seen for yourself allows you to make a conscious decision.

Run experiments – It is also possible to run simple experiments on yourself, such as reading for an hour in the morning instead of being on Twitter. After a week or two, you can see whether your outcomes have changed. If they have, this can motivate you to choose to make changes to your life.

Mental Health

Select promising pathways – I helped this coachee identify promising pathways to improve their mental health. We focused mostly on the pathway of stress reduction with some attention to physical health, nutrition, and recreation. Physical health is obviously really important for mental health as well as being an intrinsically valuable outcome metric.

Evaluate the impact of interventions – Interventions they started doing and tracking included meditation, breath work, morning journaling to help them be more grounded and to set priorities for the day, evening journaling to close off the day, and no coffee after 2 pm.

Nutrition

Your nutrition impacts your psychological and physiological outcomes, such as your level of energy or inflammation. You can optimize this by tracking what and how much you eat and examining if that is related to important outcomes.

Discover the 80/20 levers, causes, and solutions – If you know what your ‘vices’ are, you might want to start tracking them and understand how you can decrease the consumption. For example, one of my vices is pastries. I observed that there is a narrow set of occasions that makes me inclined to indulge in them. Start with addressing the most common occasion because that will give you the most bang for the buck. In this case, it was the following situation: on my way back after a workout, I usually bought pastries because I passed by a bakery and felt like “treating myself”. Two strategies helped me to make this 80% less likely: (1) walking home a different way and (2) not taking my credit card with me. I do allow myself treats sometimes, but I also have health goals that I want to achieve.

Constrain and monitor important influences – It might be wise to track food variety, supplementation, and other influential consumables, like coffee and alcohol. You might, for example, want to only consume alcohol a certain maximum number of times per month. It can be very useful to track this, and not rely on your memory. This makes you accountable to yourself and helps you to be consistent in achieving your goal. Even my baked goods example is a habit that crept up on me. Eating pizza can become a harmful habit that will show up if you are tracking it, and you will have the opportunity to intervene.

Exercise and Movement

Reveal negative effects – Vigiorus activity and movement are highly important topics for physical health that I encourage my coachees to set goals for and track because they strongly impact mental health, injury, illness, and longevity. I recommend tracking the intensity of vigorous exercise and frequency. After tracking for a while, I found that keeping my intensity to 80% was preferable, as I kept getting injuries when I exercised closer to 100%. Also, noticing what exercises and ways of performing them start to cause pain in the body led me to change exercises or modify them.

Ignite and sustain motivation – A year or so ago, I wanted to create a daily habit of low-intensity movement because I was working all day at the desk and not moving much beyond occasional visits to the bathroom, kitchen, mail, and garbage container. After a couple of months of failed attempts to do evening walks during the not-too-inviting London winter, I decided to buy a treadmill (probably my best covid buy) to minimize effort and excuse-making. This led to a daily walking habit. Later, I was even motivated to move from 30 minutes daily to 45 minutes. I do the walk after I finish my work checkout. Usually, I listen to a low-stimulation audiobook or have a sharing and caring call. With the help of tracking, I established a habit that is life-changing in the short- and long run. This habit seems to have contributed to the stability of my energy levels.

Break down yearly goals – I had thought in the past that ‘I’m in good health’ if I did strength training at the gym three times a week. In one of my yearly goal settings, I researched goals for longevity. I discovered that I need to add endurance and daily movement to ensure good cardiovascular health. I broke down my yearly goal of doing 45 minutes of walking every day into two stages: 30 minutes for Q1 and Q2, and 45 minutes for Q3 and Q4. Similarly, I did it for running as my key activity for cardiovascular health. I added those to my tracking sheet and saw my progress, which is very rewarding and gives me a high sense of growth.

Get the most bang for the buck – This is just another expression for the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule. Doing some prioritization of influences regarding their expected positive impact on outcomes you care about is essential for powerful tracking. From my understanding of health and longevity, you get good bang for the buck if you do strength training 2 to 3 times, endurance 2 to 3 times, and walk daily for 45 minutes (or 10000 steps). You can do more than that, but you should experience strong diminishing returns with each unit increase (didn’t come across good data for the cost-benefit function of daily movement). Adding the daily movement led to a practical significant increase in my energy and well-being.

Illness

Make informed decisions – I like to record on my tracking spreadsheet whenever I have any type of illness or other health deviation. This is an important metric over the course of the year, and useful to track in relation to your stress level and sleep metrics. You will see for yourself whether your sleep and stress do or don’t affect your health. Once you know, for example, what level of sleep deprivation is likely to cause you to get sick, this can help you to take steps to prevent the situation where you get physical symptoms because you chose to sacrifice sleep.

Well-being

Include the essentials – Well-being is possibly the most important metric that anyone can track. I highly recommend that my coachees always include this key metric. As discussed in depth in the section earlier in this article, I recommend a quantitative score as well as a field to record a comment or reason for the score. Any day where you do not give yourself a ‘5 out of 5’ you must record a reason for that. Sometimes you cannot pinpoint the reason you feel ‘not great.’ but you should try to work out the reason if you can.

Morning and Evening Routine

Improve consistency – Tracking your morning and evening routine will improve your consistency with them by identifying issues that compromise your compliance and informing you when they start to get shaky. If you don’t have morning and evening routines, I highly recommend creating those (see my guide here). Routines have a very positive impact on your well-being and on important outcomes in your life. There are two ways to track routines: full routine or the individual parts of the routine. Tracking individual elements is especially beneficial in the beginning because it helps you not forget a part and record if some parts are particularly difficult and need further reinforcement.

Emotions

Cultivate more awareness and understanding – Tracking your emotions can help to give you more awareness around which emotions you felt during the day, and why. You can look at both pleasing and displeasing emotions and why you felt them. I highly recommend my coachees to stop using the words “negative” and “positive” to describe emotions and use “pleasing” and “displeasing” instead because they have milder evaluative connotations and seem to lead to more constructive emotional sense-making.

Enhance how you relate to something – A reflective question that can fundamentally change how you related to displeasing emotions is: what is this emotion telling me? It is important to select the most charitable and constructive interpretation. For example, if you feel displeasing emotions after you you’ve been late, the emotion is telling you to change, so you feel and act more aligned with your value of being punctual and reliable and showing appropriate respect for the other person’s time. This gives you the opportunity to work out why you are feeling them and come up with strategies to deal with the issues. I cannot overstate the importance of making sense of your displeasing emotions. This can lead to a profound improvement in your well-being if practiced well.

Challenges

Shaping challenges – I recommend that my coachees consider tracking what they found challenging each day, and how well they responded to the challenges, as a score, but also with a comment. This can help you understand the sources of challenges and develop strategies to deal with those challenges more systematically and constructively. Challenges put well-being scores into perspective because an okay score on well-being on a challenging day might be worth more than a good score on an easy day. Your tracking spreadsheet can help you to relate these factors.

Work

Understanding time spend – It is helpful to track your time in a spreadsheet in addition to tracking it in a software, like Toggl, to have better analytics and more depth when making sense of the raw numbers. It is important to decide on a useful division of your work time and what activities to track where, and then to stick with it. I divide my time between academic work, coaching, and Flourishing Humanity Corporation. I use my tracking spreadsheet to separate the functions in my own mind and allocate the time between the roles in my masterpiece week structure (see my guide here).

Upgrade the experience of working on something – I track the time I spend co-working, how engaged, focused or distracted I am, and how much I enjoy work. I also have to keep app-blocking turned on while working. My tracking has helped me to confirm that co-working makes me more motivated and engaged.

Get Support

I advise my coachees to get support for their tracking from those around them. Your coach, friends or partner will be able to encourage you.

Tracking can improve so many aspects of your life, from health to stress, work success, motivation and productivity, emotional awareness, courage or selflessness. I haven’t found an aspect of our lives that tracking cannot help to develop and improve. It is such a versatile tool, for any goal you have in your life. I encourage all of my coachees to ‘get tracking, one entry at a time.’

Conclusion

After reading about my quite extensive and rigorous tracking system, you may feel inspired by the potential value of the tracking habit but intimidated and overwhelmed by the complexity. Remember that anyone beginning on this journey must start small and simple, and build up from there according to their own needs and their own experience. Your system will become as complex as you want it to be, and doesn’t have to resemble my system to be good for you. It is okay just to start as an experiment, and take it from there.

If you want to become ‘the most awesome version of yourself,’ one of the important ways to achieve this is by changing how you act and how you think and feel. To make these changes, you need daily systems and structures in place to help you. It is not enough to occasionally think about what you need to do, and occasionally take some action, as changes will not happen in your life. You need to implement new habits, doing them every day, day by day, without stopping. Over the course of a year, you will find that you can slowly change how you think, how you behave, and how you see yourself. Tracking is an incredibly valuable, possibly essential, tool to help you to be successful with these changes, and move towards a more ideal version of yourself.

If you are on this journey of change, you will miss out if you do not use tracking. To help make your actions more effective, and get ‘more bang for your buck’ from the effort you invest in your personal development journey, start with tracking, and build it as a habit. Try to understand what works for you, and what doesn’t, use your intuition, and build a good system for yourself.

I really cannot imagine how else I would sustain my level of performance and my level of happiness without the data, insight, and motivation I get from my tracking habit.

Get Started!

If you want to achieve your goals with high levels of well-being during this one precious life that you have, get started with tracking today, and make daily tracking ‘non-negotiable.’ Rigorous data collection around issues that really matter to you can change your life. Simply decide on five metrics that you want to track, and write them down, put them on the wall, or into a spreadsheet. Just get going and improve your life with tracking. Move from big ideas to real-world progress.

Acknowledgments

Sebastian Schmidt brought out the best in me in the interview, which was the basis for this article. Lara Rennie was key in creating the first draft of the article based on the interview transcripts.

1. I’ll be referencing many things. However, in the current versions, I’m prioritizing spending my limited time on content over hyperlinking. ↑
2. You have to zoom into some of the images and some might include German, at least the earliest one. ↑
3. However, the relationship between metrics can be bidirectional and complex, but tracking still provides significant value in practice. ↑