Why Your Mindset Matters When It Comes to Self-Tracking

Behavior change is hard. Many people struggle to maintain behavior changes over the long term, with reports of adherence failure as high as 50-80%. One effective strategy for improving adherence is self-tracking, or regularly tracking specific actions you are taking in order to reach your goals.

Self-tracking can be a powerful tool for behavior change because it helps to increase accountability and motivation. When you are regularly monitoring your progress, it becomes easier to see where you are falling short and make adjustments. It also provides a sense of accomplishment when you see progress being made.

In a randomized controlled trial published in Computers in Human Behavior, people who used a fitness tracker for just 2 weeks experienced a positive effect on their perceived physical health and their sense of accomplishment (vs. waitlist control group), and a meta analysis suggests there is sufficient evidence that self-tracking can lead to improved physical activity, body composition, and fitness.

However, what if the reported data isn't particularly inspiring? What happens after a poor night's sleep? In the GQ article "Why Tracking Your Sleep Can Backfire," the author surfaces the concept of the nocebo effect. "It's the reverse of the placebo effect, in which the expectation of good results creates them out of thin air—expecting a bad result makes it real." It's certainly possible for someone to give up or worse, experience the nocebo effect, after a few poor sleep deprived nights or overly indulgent eating days.

With that said, self-tracking alone may not be the key. In the study “The Impact of Mindset on Self-Tracking Experience,” published in Frontiers in Digital Health, the authors explore how people's beliefs about their ability to change impacts the success of self-tracking devices. They found that people's beliefs about the changeability of their behavior influenced how they felt about self-tracking. They also found differences in how people responded to failure and how self-critical or compassionate they were with themselves. These results show that mindset is critically important to how we track and invest our time.

For me, data is useful but not the end goal. I don't define a good sleep score as success, nor a poor sleep score as failure. The data is simply a tool to help me analyze whether I'm making the decisions that lead to my desired outcomes. And when I find myself not energized by the decisions I'm making -- which is seen in data trends, not single data points -- I shift my energy into exploring new behaviors.

Here are some of the ways I leverage self-tracking to supercharge my performance across my personal and professional life:

Don't Measure Everything

When it comes to health tracking, there is no shortage of tools that can track nearly every aspect of our lives, including diet (e.g. MyFitnessPal), activity (e.g. Apple Watch, Fitbit), sleep (e.g. Oura Ring), and the list goes on. You can even track your water consumption through connected water bottles (e.g. Hidrate). It’s easy to experience data fatigue, so I’d recommend starting with one to two meaningful drivers of your health.

For the past several years, I've ruthlessly prioritized sleep as one of the most important aspects of my health. Matthew Walker, PhD describes in "Why We Sleep":

"Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day -- Mother Nature's best effort yet at contra-death."

I find myself noticeably more productive, patient, creative, empathetic, and happier when I consistently hit my sleep goals. And I know the opposite is true when I don't. So, I religiously track my sleep and have invested in a number of routines and tools to maximize my sleep quality (will share more in the future).

During the holiday season, where my diet and exercise numbers have suffered, I still find myself grounded and energized by focusing on the one area that matters most to me: sleep.

No matter what you choose to focus on, I'd suggest being intentional and highly selective. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the quantity of self-tracking data and to feel like a failure when even one of your indicators wanes.

Time Tracking

“Time isn't the main thing. It's the only thing.” - Miles Davis

When it comes to our professional lives, most of us are not as equipped with tools to create that same sense of accountability. Self-tracking is also a powerful leadership tool that can help us monitor our progress and identify areas for improvement.

They say if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. When we’re busy, we must take a careful inventory of our time to figure out where we should focus, where we should delegate, and where we should deprioritize. Otherwise, we easily become reactive and overextended, leading to burnout, waste, and poor productivity.

How do you know if you are allocating your time wisely towards the things that matter most to us and our business? Track yourself.

One tool I use for this is Reclaim, which provides reports on how our calendar is allocated. When you see where your time is spent, you can more easily reflect on how much work you achieved and how you feel about the quality of your work.

It’s not just about the quantity of time you invest in different areas, but it’s about what you actually achieve with the limited time you have. Next week, we’ll discuss some goal setting frameworks next week to ensure we’re putting time in the areas that matter most.

Optimizing Mindset

Like in the “The Impact of Mindset on Self-Tracking Experience” study mentioned earlier, your mindset and how you feel will play a key role in your success in how you achieve your desired goals. As we look at our schedules, do we feel energized or drained by how we are spending out time? Are we bringing the right mindset into our planning and performance at work? These are critical questions to answer.

Furthermore, when we pay attention to our health indicators, we can identify areas that may be impacting our performance as a leader. For example, if we're not getting enough sleep, we may notice that our decision-making skills are impaired, we aren’t as present or patient in meetings, or that we're not nearly as productive.

On those sleep deprived days where my Oura Ring reminds me that I may not be at my prime, I’ll do my best to optimize my mindset by making sure I get exposed to plenty of sunlight, recharge with breath work and meditation, and perform some light exercise to pick up my energy. I also will try to deprioritize work that day that requires a lot of creative or strategic thinking, which I know will be impaired.

On the other hand, if I’m coming off of a great night’s sleep, I’ll start the day with a challenging morning workout, and I can pick up the intensity of my work and prioritize my time towards focusing on key decisions or issues that require my best self being present.

In summary, by leveraging a combination of self-tracking tools along with honing in on our health indicators and mindset, we can best prioritize how we use our time. This ultimately helps us to be the best leaders we can be, both for ourselves and for our teams.

What self-tracking tools do you use in your personal and professional life?