5 reasons to start tracking your life immediately

Everybody seems to be tracking oneself for their own reasons, so here is a collection of my favourite ones. In short, tracking will have a way larger impact on your life than any other activity. And it takes less than three minutes a day! Still hesitating? Here is why!

1. You become what you do

Tracking is the only way to get a clear idea of what you do most of the time in your life.

We do spend a lot of time underestimating and overestimating what it is exactly that we do. Tracking is the only way to get a clear idea of what you do most of the time in your life. It will paint you a clear picture of how many hours are spent practicing the activities which bring you closer to your goals vs. the activities which don’t but you still seem to be doing. It will raise important questions about where does time go in your life – if you are doing them and they don’t bring you closer to your dreams goals, do they have any other value in your life?

2. Tracking helps you make time

Many of us complain of “not enough time” to add any other interests to our busy schedules. Our time seems to just slip away. It does of course, because for some activities you haven’t yet carved the time in your diary. Tracking helps you estimate how many hours of the day/week will be already claimed by activities which will bring you closer to your goals and how many hours can be “lost” in secondary tasks which are still necessary, but not on your goal radar. In a way tracking what you do daily adds a dose of realism and with some cold-hearted logic explains to you where your time really goes, so that you can make the necessary changes.

3. It helps you revise your strategies along the way

No matter what your goal, at some point you will wonder if you are using the right strategy to achieve it. You will want to compare and evaluate, could you be doing something differently/better/faster? If you are learning a language by mostly watching TV and listening to the radio, the improvements you “hear” might be great, but will you be able to read or write? Maybe it is time to adjust to a more varied approach of learning, which includes techniques to learn to write, and track the results.

4. Your tracking will pick you up when you lose motivation

When you have all that data about yourself, you can do some pretty cool things with it.

When you have all that data about yourself, you can do some pretty cool things with it. Let us take training as an example – sometimes you train regularly and for about three weeks you seem to be reaching a plateau. Now that is completely normal in the cycle of training yet, when it happens you see that you don’t approach the training with the same enthusiasm and motivation. This is a very powerful moment to take out your training graphs and statistics and remind yourself: the progress you have already made, how many hours you have spent and how many milestones you have already passed.

5. You will actually be tracking your life (this is by far my favourite reason)

You will be writing the diary of your future achievements

If you start tracking now, you will essentially be writing the diary of your future achievements, the draft version of your letter to your future self, the backbone of your future memoirs… Think about it, you are probably about to learn a new language, or do your first Ironman triathlon or climb your first mountain. One day you will find all your firsts, with exact dates, beautiful graphs and your personal notes detailing your everyday trials and tribulations that you went through to become who you are.

This post was written by our guest writer Lily Pashova – many thanks Lily for sharing your insights!

Start tracking your activities on the Goalmap app. Tracking will have a way larger impact on your life than any other activity which takes less than three minutes a day. You can download Goalmap here: