How to Find the Right Amount of Self-Measurement [#72]

“What gets measured, gets managed.” — Peter Drucker

I use this quote a lot. Because I believe that it’s fundamentally correct: it’s difficult to improve something if you can’t measure the improvement. 

Following that logic, I started tracking everything on a personal basis: 

• Financial in- and outflows
• Cardiovascular strain
• Sleep data (specifically sleep performance and hours spent in restorative sleep)
• Recovery scores
• Daily behaviors
• Calories & macronutrients
• How I’m spending my time 
• Alcohol consumption

(Notable exclusion: nighttime erections, I ain’t no Bryan Johnson). 

This had a few interesting effects: 

1. I became more disciplined about all those things (that’s good)
2. I spent several hours per week inputting and analyzing data (not so good)
3. I started to connect my sense of well-being and self-worth to my KPIs (bad) 

Doing some form of self-measurement is good, but doing too much of it is bad. Which lead me to the question: “how much tracking is too much tracking?”

That’s what I want to explore in today’s newsletter. 

Let’s dive in. 🤿

The Good

I first got my WHOOP in December 2019. The effects were imminent: by meticulously tracking all my behavior patterns, I quickly gathered a baseline of what’s good and bad for me.

For example, I learned that supplementing Magnesium before bed would increase my average recovery score by 4%, whereas having a late meal would reduce it by 5%. 

Also – not that you’d need a fitness tracker to tell you this – I learned that alcohol is bad for you; more specifically, how bad it is for you. Even a few beers late in the evening could completely screw over recovery.

This data allowed for experimentation and rapid improvement of habits: 

• No late meals (and if I have practice at night, make sure to have an early dinner and only a protein shake after)
• Try to drink less, and if you do, earlier in the day
• Magnesium daily
• Candlelight before bed 

These are habits that I stick to to this day – in a way, measuring my behavioral and fitness data made a significant impact on my overall health. That was good. 

Positive effects of measurement arise elsewhere, too:

In strength training, documenting each session allow for progressive overload – because you remember last session’s weights. (+ when you look at the plans a few years later, you’ll see how far you’ve come). 

Calorie & macronutrient tracking works really well, too: by simply tracking your meals, you understand how many calories you’re taking in (spoiler: more than you think), and whether you’re getting enough protein (spoiler: less than you think).

Tracking these for 2-3 weeks gives you a really good idea about your daily intake and allows to make adjustments. 

In the realm of productivity, establishing a baseline of how I spent my time was super helpful too. Too much time in meetings, even more on distractions that forced me to context switch, a shockingly little amount of time spent in deep work.

Spending – same thing. If you have no idea how much you spend, tracking it for 2-3 weeks gives you a great idea where your leverage is (like: stopping to get takeout daily) and where spending is reasonable. 

All these things I could only optimize because I now knew where my baseline was. For that, self-measurement is wonderful.

The Bad

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” — unknown

As with all things in life, self-measurement should be done in moderation. Otherwise, it might lead to:

Obsessive & Compulsive Behavior

Few things give me more anxiety than this notification on my phone: “Your WHOOP’s battery is less than 10%” – with no charger in sight. I’ve maintained a continuous data streak for more than five years now, and really don’t want to break it. 

Which, of course, is completely silly. My data doesn't become less valuable just because I’m missing a few hours of tracking here and there.

I’m not alone here. A 2021 study found that tracking apps often trigger or exacerbate disordered behaviors, with some participants reporting “feeling lost” without their trackers. A bad recovery score shouldn’t ruin your entire day – it should merely be a signal that you might want to take it a bit easier than usual. 

This leads to perfectionism: wanting to achieve all the targets all the time – which, realistically, is impossible. You will miss your step count, your calorie target, or a workout once – and that’s okay. What matters is that you do the things most of the time: consistency > perfection. 

More importantly, obsessive tracking detracts from being in the moment: the feeling of guilt for having had an ice cream cone overwhelms the joy you’re getting from eating it (which is the precise point of eating ice cream!). 

Surveillance Stress

Using productivity apps and time trackers can swing into the other direction quickly. 2 out of 3 remote workers report increased stress due to “surveillance anxiety”: the simple fact that one’s productivity is monitored already increases stress levels.

This gets worse when the results are shared with managers – but even if you’re tracking these things on your own, you become your own productivity watchdog. 

Productivity apps also do two more things: 

1. They nag you to finish open tasks, which leads to decreased mental bandwidth due to the Zeigarnik Effect: people tend to remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. 
2. By indexing on finished tasks – not on overall output – they encourage you to finish smaller tasks first. But usually, it’s the big, daunting tasks that move the needle. Productivity apps tend to live in the “urgent, not important”-quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix. 
   

Lack of decision energy

When tracking expenses excessively, you might find the need to track every single one of them. This leads to decisions that ultimately don’t move the needle: buying a 4€ flat white won’t make or break the bank.

Instead, use this energy to focus on the financial decisions that move the needle: 

• Renegotiating your salary
• Cutting recurring expenses that you don’t use 
• Identifying lower credit payments on your mortgage 

Most people worry about spending too much on coffee, but when buying a house, 30k more or less isn’t that big of a deal.

Which is false: 30k is still 30k, regardless of the context.

(Just think of all the flat whites you could buy for that kind of money. In fact, if you invested that at an average 4% return, it’d finance 10 months of daily flat whites every year. 🤯)

Task Paralysis 

I’m a big fan of breaking down tasks into their granular parts.

“Build a website” isn’t a well-framed task and thus can be difficult to start. It helps to break this down: first, you buy a domain, then, you pick a website builder, write some copy, etc. A lot of small steps lead to big results. 

This can swing into the other direction: when people become obsessed with task completion, and get a dopamine hit every time they check something off, this leads them to breaking down tasks a bit too granularly.

1. Now, they spend more time checking off tasks than actually doing the tasks
2. They have so many tasks in their to-do app that they become overwhelmed and avoid them altogether

All the sudden, you’re facing the issue of “hyper-productivity”: wanting to be so productive that no matter what you do, you could always do more.

Pair this with the planning fallacy (first described by Kahnemann & Tversky in 1979), where we always plan more than we can realistically achieve, and you have the perfect storm for disappointment.

All of this is bad.

But it gets worse – when self-measurement doesn’t just increase stress, but causes adverse effects that do the exact opposite of the initial purpose. 

The Ugly 

Last year, I tracked my alcohol consumption in an Excel spreadsheet. Generally, it was good to visualize how much or little I drink: a green cell meant no drinks consumed, a yellow cell was 1-3 drinks, orange 4-6, red 7+. Definitely a good experiment … until I started gaming the system.

Initially, I had more “green” days with zero drinks: because I’d question whether it’s worth having a beer today at all. This was good.

But once I decided I was going to have that beer, well, I might as well have 2 more as the cell would still be yellow. 

This lead to an overall increase in alcohol consumed – just on less days. I achieved the exact opposite of what I was looking to achieve: drinking less. 

Financial Decisions

If you’ve checked your stock portfolio recently (I haven’t), that was probably stressful. Trump’s liberation day liberated a lot of shareholders from their portfolio value, and if you meticulously track your finances, you might have been tempted to sell stock. 

“Time in the market beats timing the market.” You’re likely to make more money by simply holding stocks than by trying to react to the market. Unless you’re a seasoned investment professional, actively picking stocks tends to be a worse strategy than simply buying index funds and holding. 

By tracking your stock portfolio meticulously, you might actually make worse financial decisions than if you didn’t. 

Orthosomnia

I learned something new researching this newsletter: the concept of “Orthosomnia”.

First coined in a 2017 study, it describes people who become so obsessed with hitting perfect sleep metrics that they, paradoxically, begin suffering from insomnia. They think so much about their sleep that it keeps them up at night. How ironic. 

The Right Amount

This leaves the question: what is the right amount of tracking? 

Here’s my prescription: 

1. Identify one behavior you want to change (let’s say, eating)
2. Track it meticulously for 2-3 weeks to establish a baseline using your current standards (simply document what you’re eating)
3. Make adjustments that move the standard into another direction (optional: don’t track for 1-2 weeks to get used to them)
4. Track again to see if it’s making a meaningful difference (overall calorie intake, macro composition, but also lagging indicators like body fat %)
5. Once the habit is established, stop tracking it 
6. Re-track once a year to ensure you’re not off your baseline

I feel that tracking offers diminishing returns: the first 2-3 weeks are the most insightful, and the utility drops rapidly after. Once a new habit is established, it’s fine to only look at it occasionally. (Example: I weigh myself about once a month, realize that I’m still the same weight, and go about my day.) 

Two more things: 

1. Automate your data collection, but don’t look at it: it can be very interesting to do a retrospective analysis, and you can only do this if you collect the data in the first place. For example, I don’t look at my WHOOP every day, but I wear it every day – so I can see the long term effects. Similarly, I have a time tracker documenting everything that I do on my computer, but I don’t look at the data often. 
2. Stop setting arbitrary goals and start improving the measured baseline. It’s great that you want to work out six times a week, but if your status quo is twice a week, then it’d be much better to improve on that baseline first. I tend to set objectives that are way too high, and think I’d be much better off trying to do better than last week. 

Good thing it’s Easter Monday today – might mean you’ve had more time to read this.

Hope this was useful! 

(If so, please forward this to one friend who also tracks too much of their data.) 

Have a great start to the week. 

LFG 🔥
Dominik

PS: In case you want to go even deeper, here are a two free resources that I’ve created about tracking. 

• The Circadian Productivity Tracker will help you understand at which times of the day you’re most productive. 
• The Ultimate Guide to Time Tracking explains the ins and outs of successfully documenting where your time goes – and what you can do to change it. 

Thanks to Christian Keller for providing valuable input for this article.

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