Taking a break from tracking stuff
2024-05-31
Like many productivity nerds I'm quite a big fan of tracking stuff, but lately I found my self feeling somewhat restricted or stressed by keeping up with entering all this data into my different tracking solutions. That's why I want to take a break from many aspects of this habit during my vacation and share my thoughts on it with you in this post...
First and foremost, I want to make it clear that I deliberately started tracking many aspects of my life, since this data gives me quite valuable insights into what I do, how I do it as well as what could be improved and also creates positive incentives to reach my goals, since I'm way more accountable for what I'm doing when I have to enter it into some sort of tracking system. Specificially, I'm tracking my calories with the excellent open source app Energize , my running sessions with FitoTrack and maintain a detailed calendar, with which I plan most things I do and into which I also enter the unplanned ones in a fifteen minute grid. Additionally, I write a daily diary at the end of each day to braindump thoughts I have and also enter some less digitally recorded data into it like the time I slept, my weight, my exercise sessions and so on. I also learn flash cards with Anki on a daily basis, but that shouldn't be considered "tracking stuff" in my mind.
This rather complicated setup is the result of several years of inceasingly detailed tracking and lately I have started to feel somewhat overwhelmed by it, since from my perspective I spent more time and thus energy maintaining it than I save from the insights it gives me. This is a really personal feeling, but it's there and ignoring it would be a really bad decision, since none of this is mandatory and the whole point of tracking stuff is to benefit you and your happiness.
Thus, I'm taking a break from doing most of this during my holiday, which means that I just won't touch Energize, FitoTrack or my calendar and also won't add any additional data into my diary besides my pure thoughts. I'll keep the diary in its purest form, since I really enjoy how relieved I always feel after writing down what happened during the day and what thoughts I have been dealing with, but also want to allow myself to truely live an unpressured life by stopping all the other tracking I do. I'm sure that I won't stop doing all of it in the future, but taking a break from everything allows me to reflect and appreciate the value of the things that benefit me, while also being able to identify to aspects that really just create unnecessary pressure.
I'm really curious what this "experiment" will lead me to and plan to share my results with you when I'm back from this long-overdue vacation with some of my best friends. In case you have any thoughts on tracking stuff yourself, as always feel free to share them in the comments down below and have a lovely day...
PS: This one was released a little early, since I'm also leaving my laptop at home during the holiday to disconnect at least a little bit more from my everday life, but also didn't want to skip a week...