Active Tracking > Passive Tracking

For decades, the #1 recommendation from personal development leaders has always been the same. If you want to improve anything about your life, the most effective thing you can do is to start tracking it. 

When you track, you create awareness. Rather than a bad habit happening without you even realizing it, you have to look at it every single day when you track it. Instead of just setting a goal for the day and forgetting to do anything about it, tracking makes you report back on how you did with it. Tracking offers a feedback loop that gives you visibility into things you couldn’t see before, and with more awareness, you can make better choices and take better actions that create better results.

However, there’s one important detail to add to the concept of tracking. You need to engage with the data you’re collecting. For example, if you wear a smart watch that’s counting your steps, or your phone keeps track of how many minutes you spend on social media, it does you know good if you never look at it.

With that in mind I want to highlight the two different types of tracking: Active tracking and passive tracking.

Active tracking involves you manually reporting, reflecting, and documenting how you did in any given day. It works really well because it brings to your consciousness all of the little decisions you made throughout the day, and how they impacted the end result. Taking a moment to actively track makes you think about everything that happened when you weren’t thinking about it, and it helps you get an objective view into your performance versus a subjective impression.

For example, you might think you worked out today because you went to the gym, but when you realize that you only spent 10 minutes on a treadmill and went in the sauna, you realize that doesn't meet your standard for a workout. Or you might think you ate relatively healthy, but then you’re logging your food in a nutrition app you remember you went through a bag of chips after lunch when you weren’t even hungry.

Passive tracking is still helpful because the data is collected for you. You don’t need to report or document your performance yourself, there’s a technology that’s doing it on your behalf. And this is great to have available to you, but again, only when you take time to look at what the data says. I wear an Aura ring at night when I sleep. It gives me great insight into how well I slept and how much I slept. But that’s only when I review the data and reflect on what factors influenced it.

In other words: If you don’t pay attention to how you’re performing - actively collecting your own datapoints in key areas or reviewing data collected passively on your behalf - it does nothing for you, and all of the potential you have to improve your life gets lost.

As someone dedicated to maintaining a really high standard for myself and who’s always seeking to improve, that’s why I track my performance every single day in my Self Improvement Scorecard. Without it, I lack the critical awareness I need to hold myself accountable. If you want to see my daily performance tracking process and implement a version of it for yourself in your life, I’ve got a video showing you how I track my performance on a daily basis, and where you can get started for yourself.