As you may know from reading my blog, I’m on a bit of a quantified self binge right now. In particular, I’ve set some relatively ambitious goals with respect to fitness and health. As I've reflected on the first month of the process, I was struck by the way in which I repeatedly attempted to delude myself when I was clearly missing my goals.
One of my goals is to increase my physical fitness, as measured by resting heart rate, body fat, and weight. Because of [insert_list_of_excuses], I’m currently not tracking towards achieving this goal. I certainly need to be better, but I also need to be more honest with myself. With a goal like weight loss, there are inevitably fluctuations around a trend. If I weigh myself every day, there are often natural fluctuations of a couple pounds as a result of differing levels of hydration and how recently I’ve eaten. When I’m behind on my goal, however, I’ve found myself much more loathe to step on the scale when I know I’ve been bad. I don’t want to see the quantitive metric that shows that I’m failing. Even though I know in my head that my weight probably went up, actually stepping on the scale and logging it feels like a failure. Instead, I’m tempted to tell myself that I'll be better the next day and then step on when I’m tracking. Unfortunately, things come up, and all of the sudden I’ve lost 3 days.
On the other hand, I'm ahead of my goal for reading. I'm tearing through books, and keep adding more and more to my list. I know that I'm ahead of my goal, but I still, irrationally, want to read ever more. Having the tracking system in place has helped me consciously slow myself down, allowing me to reallocate time towards some of my other aspirations - writing a simple iPhone app, for example. Having metrics to check in with week over week has provided me with the structure to manage myself, and I think that it has been one more step towards becoming an effective human.
In reality, just stepping on the scale is the action that allows me to reset. Having that metric, locking in at a new number, that's what forces me to come to terms with my progress, or lack thereof. At this point, I'm tracking 10 discrete goals via Beeminder via a complex network of applications, triggers, and feedback loops. The simple act of looking at my landing page every day gives me the data I need to plan, move forward, and adjust my behavior.
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