At some point, looking after yourself picked up quite a lot of paperwork.
Steps. Sleep score. Readiness. Resting heart rate. Calories. Protein. Training load. Recovery. Strain. Weight. Body fat. Water. Supplements. Zones.
Any one of them might help. So why not track the lot?
The reality is that numbers are useless unless the number has a job.
If it helps you make a decision, answer a question or keep doing something you care about, track it. The rest can sit in the app without requiring your attention.
Monitoring can help
There is good evidence that monitoring progress can help people reach goals.
A meta-analysis of 138 randomised studies involving nearly 20,000 people compared interventions that encouraged people to monitor their progress.[1]
The interventions produced a large increase in how often people monitored their progress and a small to moderate improvement in reaching the goal. The increase in monitoring also helped to explain the improvement in results. Effects were larger when people physically recorded their progress and when the results were reported or made public.
This gives us a good reason to track something when we are deliberately trying to change it. If you want to walk more, recording your steps may keep the goal in mind. If you are training for something, a training log can show what you have done. Logging food for a while can reveal patterns that are easy to miss when you are relying on memory.
The important phrase is progress towards a goal.
The people in the review had a target and were encouraged to monitor information connected with it. That is different from waking up to a dashboard of numbers before you have decided what you want to use any of them for.
More data is not automatically more useful.
The healthy behaviour already takes time
You have to go for the walk, do the workout, buy the food, cook it and get to bed at a reasonably sensible hour.
Tracking brings a few more jobs with it. Charge the watch. Wear it. Open the app. Enter the food. Check the sleep score. Look at the recovery number. Work out why it changed. Decide whether 63 is good. Read something about heart-rate variability because apparently you now need to understand that as well.
Each task is small. Together they can become tiring because you have added another set of things to remember and think about.
That may be time well spent when the information is helping. It becomes harder to justify when you are checking out of habit and carrying on exactly as before.
The aim is to keep the information that earns your attention, not to achieve perfect ignorance.
Give each number a job
Take one thing you track and ask three questions.
What decision does it change?
Your resting heart rate is unusually high and you make the day’s session easier. Your running pace has stopped improving, so you look at the training you have been doing. The number leads somewhere.
What question is it helping you answer?
You log your food for two weeks to see what lunch normally contains. You record your sleep because you want to know what happens after late work, alcohol or travel. The tracking has a purpose and the question has an end.
Do you genuinely enjoy knowing it?
You may like watching your step count rise. Closing the rings might get you out for a walk. You may be interested in the effects of travel even when you have no immediate plan to change anything.
Enjoyment and curiosity are perfectly good reasons to continue.
If the answer to all three questions is no, try turning the number off for a week. You can bring it back if you miss it or discover that it was helping more than you realised.
If tracking starts to make you feel anxious or compulsive, that is useful information too. A tool intended to support the routine should not take over how you feel about the routine.
Track for a season
Not every useful measurement needs to become a permanent part of being a healthy person.
A period of closer tracking can answer a basic question. Food logging may show what you are actually eating. A sleep record may reveal a pattern. A training log can tell you whether you are progressing when the sessions have started blending together in your memory.
Once you have learnt what you wanted to know, you can decide whether continuing is worth the effort. A fortnight of food logging can finish after a fortnight. If another question comes up in six months, you can use it again.
Research into tracker abandonment supports the idea that the value of tracking changes with circumstances. A literature review and survey of former wearable users found several recurring reasons for stopping. Tracking had lost its appeal, routines or priorities had changed, or the information felt inaccurate or useless. Some people also stopped because the behaviour they wanted had become habitual and the tracker no longer seemed necessary.[2]
A tool can be useful for a period without becoming part of your identity.
Athletes may need detailed information because small differences can affect performance. Anyone managing a medical condition may need precise monitoring and should follow the advice of the clinicians involved. The point is not to discard information that has a clear purpose.
The point is to notice when it no longer has one.
Enough information for everyday fitness
For everyday fitness, you may need less information than the dashboard offers.
You may want to know whether you are moving regularly, doing some resistance work, sleeping reasonably well and improving at the thing you care about. You may also care whether all of this is making everyday life easier.
Someone training for a marathon will need different information from someone trying to walk more. A person working on strength will pay attention to different things from somebody trying to improve their sleep.
Make the target reasonably clear and the useful measurements become easier to choose.
Add a metric when it helps you answer a question, see progress or make a decision. Keep it while it continues to do something useful, or because you genuinely enjoy knowing.
The app may still contain another twelve graphs. They do not all need an audience.
Close the app
The point of going for a walk is mostly that you went for a walk.
Being stronger helps when you need to carry something, climb the stairs or get up from the floor.
Sleeping well improves the hours when you are awake.
Numbers help with all of this because they can show you something you would otherwise have missed. Give the useful ones your attention.
Once you have seen what you need to see, close the app and get on with the day.
Keep starting.
References
1. Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., and Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198 to 229.
2. Attig, C., and Franke, T. (2020). Abandonment of personal quantification: A review and empirical study investigating reasons for wearable activity tracking attrition. Computers in Human Behavior, 102, 223 to 237.