Last spring I stood in my kitchen at 11:52 p.m., doing calf raises while the kettle boiled, so my phone would buzz and a little ring would close and a cartoon owl would be proud of me. The tea was for a sleep score. The calf raises were for an activity goal I’d set in January, back when I was briefly a different, better woman who lived in my head and paid my rent. This essay is about her, and about me, and about the four years of apps and spreadsheets I kept to bridge the distance between us.
For about four years, I tracked nearly everything I did. Sleep, steps, water, mood, meals, money, books, Spanish, laundry. Yes, laundry. There was a spreadsheet. It had a tab for socks, and I want to state this plainly: no sock was ever improved by it.
The habit has a name â the quantified self â though at the time I just called it being responsible, which is what everyone calls their own particular haunting. I’m not here to tell you tracking is evil. Some of it earned its keep and still lives on my phone. But somewhere between the sleep score and the sock tab, the tracking stopped describing my life and started standing in for it. I spent more time filing evidence of living than doing the living, and the filed version of my life looked great while the actual one smelled like the gym bag I kept meaning to log.
What I Was Tracking (the Full Inventory)
In the interest of full disclosure, here is what lived on my phone at the peak: a sleep app that scored me out of a hundred every morning like a disappointed teacher; a step counter with three rings and no chill; a water tracker I tapped like a lighter; a mood app that wanted my day rated one to five before I’d finished my coffee, which is like reviewing a movie during the trailers; a period tracker; a budget spreadsheet; a reading tracker that counted books the way a toll booth counts cars; and Duolingo, which gets its own paragraph later and possibly its own lawyer.
And the laundry log. One March I made a spreadsheet to optimize laundry. Columns for load, day, and dry time, plus a notes field I filled in exactly once, with the word why. Six weeks of data confirmed what my grandmother would have said for free: laundry gets done when I run out of underwear, and not one day sooner. I have a history of building systems for the woman in my head â I once quit a morning routine with full funeral honors â but the laundry spreadsheet is the purest specimen, because laundry cannot be optimized by shame. It can only be done.
What the Numbers Actually Told Me
The data was accurate and useless. It was a weather report for a room I was already sitting in. Tracking every aspect of your life turns out to be a part-time job with no benefits and a boss who never speaks.
My sleep app knew I averaged six hours and forty minutes. It reported this every morning in a pleasant shade of judgmental blue. What it never offered was what to do about it, because the answer was go to bed earlier, and also get a different job, and neither of those is an app feature. Instead it sent a wind-down reminder at 9:45, which I swiped away, and a breathing exercise, which I did once, resentfully, while watching television.
The mood app gave me a three out of five for eleven straight weeks. There was no button for fine, I guess, and no button for it’s February. So I logged my three, and the app drew a gentle downward chart, and I checked the chart every day to see how I was feeling. That’s the part I keep returning to: I wasn’t using the app to feel better. I was using it to find out whether I felt better. The chart said no. Then I felt worse. The measurement was the injury.
Meanwhile, the gap between the tracked me and the actual me kept widening. The spreadsheet me did laundry on Sundays, meal-prepped, and read fifty-two books a year. The actual me ate the meal-prepped lunches for dinner by Wednesday, wore the last clean bra a week straight, and finished the year eleven books short of the goal â at which point the reading tracker asked if I wanted to lower my goal, with all the warmth of a landlord asking whether I intended to renew.
What the Research Says About Tracking Everything
The quantified self â âself-knowledge through numbersâ â has a founding story: two Wired editors, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, coined the term in 2007 and began holding conferences where people compared heart-rate variability like trading cards. The tools have since moved from the conference hall into everyone’s pocket, and researchers have spent a decade asking whether all this self-tracking actually helps.
One result I think about a lot: in 2016, University of Pittsburgh researchers published a two-year randomized trial in JAMA. Nearly five hundred young adults, the same diet and exercise counseling for everyone, and half of them got an activity tracker to wear. At the end, the group wearing the trackers had lost less weight than the group without them â about five pounds less. The tracker didn’t add motivation. It seems to have quietly substituted for it. You wear the effort on your wrist, and the wrist starts to feel like the effort itself.
There’s an older, cheaper way to say this. Goodhart’s law, after the economist Charles Goodhart: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. My step count was a measure of walking until January, when it became a target, at which point my walking became whatever closed the ring. I have walked laps around my kitchen island at midnight. I have paced the hallway like a ghost with a fitness band. The number went up. The walking, as a thing I enjoyed, quietly died.
The Owl and the Unanswered Texts
And then there was Duolingo. I kept a four-hundred-day streak in a language app. I did my Spanish at 11:47 p.m., in bed, in the dark, while the little owl watched me with flat, patient eyes. Four hundred days. I can ask where the library is. I cannot understand the answer.
Meanwhile, my sister’s texts sat unanswered for days. Not because I didn’t love her. Because nothing happened when I ignored her. No owl came for me. There was no streak with my sister, no flame to keep alive, no ring to close. The apps had engineered consequences for neglect, and my actual life had engineered none, so I sorted my attention by which inbox would punish me. I’ve written about the guilt of unanswered texts before, and the tracking years were that guilt with a scoreboard attached.
None of this is an accident of design, by the way. Streaks exist because streaks retain, and a retained user is a renewed subscription. The owl is not your friend. The owl is a customer-retention strategy with eyes.
My sister is the person who drove forty minutes to bring me soup when I had a cold I’d rated a two. The owl is a drawing. I know which one I’d save in a fire, and it took a spreadsheet for me to forget.
What I Kept, What I Deleted, and the Three Questions I Ask Now
Here is what survived the purge, and why. The budget spreadsheet stayed, because rent is due on the first whether I feel aligned with my goals or not. Money has a boss â the landlord â and the spreadsheet reports to the boss. Tracking works for me when the number feeds a decision someone actually has to make, and whether I can afford the good olive oil is a decision I make every month with my whole heart.
The period tracker stayed, because my doctor asks questions and I like answering with dates instead of vibes. Same test as the spreadsheet: someone else is waiting for the number.
And my sister and I share a step count now, which I grudgingly admit is the system working as intended. Not because the number matters. Because she sends pictures of her dog on her walks and I send back the worst parked cars on my block, and the step count is just the excuse. The tracking went from being the relationship to being the venue.
Everything else got deleted. The purge took eleven minutes, which is less time than I once spent renaming the laundry spreadsheet. I sat on the bedroom floor and uninstalled apps with the grim ceremony of someone defusing a bomb that turned out to be a water reminder. I did not feel free right away. I felt unemployed. That’s worth saying out loud: if quitting a tracker feels like losing a job, that’s information about the tracker, not about you.
Before anything new gets installed, it has to pass three questions. One: does this number change a decision I actually make? Two: does tracking it make me better at the thing, or just sadder about it? Three: could a person do this app’s job better? The water app failed all three. Water has never once needed my help.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the quantified self?
It’s the practice of measuring your own life with apps, wearables, and spreadsheets â sleep, mood, steps, spending â usually summarized as self-knowledge through numbers. Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly coined the term in 2007. The tools now live in most pockets.
Is tracking your life bad for you?
Not automatically. It helps when a number feeds a real decision â a budget feeding rent, a symptom log a doctor actually reads. It tends to hurt when the number becomes the point: calf raises at midnight for a ring, instead of walking somewhere you wanted to go.
Should I delete all my tracking apps?
Keep whatever passes three questions: does the number change a decision, does tracking improve the thing it measures, and could a person do the app’s job better. Delete the rest without a funeral. I kept two apps and a spreadsheet, and I sleep the same â badly, but honestly.
Do habit trackers actually work?
For some habits, yes â medication reminders, physical therapy exercises, budgeting. The evidence thins out when the goal is something soft like wellness or sleep, and one two-year trial found activity trackers slightly reduced weight loss. If a habit needs a streak to survive, it’s worth asking whether the streak is feeding the habit or eating it.
What do I do instead of tracking everything?
Whatever you were going to do, slightly worse, without a witness. Walk without counting. Sleep without a score. Text your sister back within a day â not because an owl is watching, but because she is.
What I Did With the Twenty Minutes I Got Back
Nothing, mostly. That’s the honest answer. I stand in the kitchen and drink the tea while it’s still hot, which the sleep app had no field for. Sometimes I fold laundry with a podcast on, and the laundry takes exactly as long as it always did, because laundry is a chore, not a metric. The gap between the tracked life and the lived one doesn’t close with a better system. It closes when you put the phone in the drawer and go be bad at something for a while.
It’s Sunday evening as I write this. The laundry is in the machine, unscheduled and unlogged, folding to follow. My phone is in the drawer where I keep the takeaway menus. In a minute I’ll stand at the counter and drink something warm while it’s still warm, and nobody will score it, and it will still have happened. That’s the whole argument. The life is the data. Love you, mean it.