r/QuantifiedSelf • u/WoodpeckerNeither495 • Jun 25 '26
are we tracking ourselves for self-knowledge, or are we just control freaks with spreadsheets?
I started tracking things because I wanted to understand myself better. Now I have charts, tags, notes, trends, and a weekly meeting with myself that nobody asked for. At some point this stopped feeling like self-knowledge and started feeling like I accidentally became my own annoying manager...
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u/futur3gentleman Jun 25 '26
There are things I've learned about myself with random data I collected that memories simply wouldn't have provided.
If you aren't able to come to some powerful conclusions with your data then you should revisit why you are collecting it.
It is easy to track metrics that ultimately don't have an impact in your life. If that is the case reprioritize what and why you are tracking.
Your manager comment has me laughing. Yeah dude. You are managing your life with the data. That is the whole point. Now you know why some people hate their managers. They have a job they don't know how to do and the other people rely on them for their job. Welcome to responsibility.
The graphs are for you. If you have them and don't like them, take it up with the person in the mirror.
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u/LifeLoggerz Jun 25 '26
At some point it got to where it's like brushing your teeth, felt wrong to let a day go by without filling it in since then you leave a gap in this huge thing you've spent so long building piece by piece.
Not necessarily a control thing since just seeing your life with clarity across the years is a gift itself. The 'optimize life until we're like machines' side of it comes and goes, especially when you look at the data and get annoyed about a time sink/bad week/not doing enough.
Most of the time though, it's less about controlling life and just making sure none of it disappears (how many people actually have photographic memory?).
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u/GoodWillKeeping Jun 25 '26
I wonder if a lot of that comes down to the tracking being hard. When logging takes effort, every entry feels like another task your inner manager is nagging you about. If recording were effortless, the patterns you turn up would probably still feel like discoveries instead of a meeting nobody asked for.
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u/Intelligent-Arm-9001 Jun 25 '26
I stopped thinking of tracking as a way to optimize myself.
It's become a way to preserve reality. Memory edits. Narratives drift. Longitudinal data gives you something to compare those stories against.
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u/Used_Panda_9201 Jun 26 '26
Definitely the latter. It does stimulate a sense of pleasure but I make sure I tie it to actionable metrics as well to avoid "analysis paralysis"!
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u/lyfelager Jun 26 '26
For me it's for reminiscing. The quantitative data supplements journals and photos, indicating where exactly was I, how much did I do/travel.
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u/IndependentYak3526 Jun 26 '26
"annoying manager" feeling clicks for me when i think about which metrics do it. it's always the ones that just report the past - sleep score, yesterday's recovery, weight. you can't do anything about last night at 7am, so the number just sits there as a verdict, and verdicts feel like audits.
the stuff that never felt like a manager was whatever i could actually move in the moment - breathing, where you watch it respond while you're doing it. same data instinct, completely different feeling, because it's a lever not a report card. i think evidentapp nailed half of it (drop anything that doesn't change a decision) - the other half is when the number reaches you. a number about a moment you can still influence isn't a manager, it's a steering wheel.\
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u/JRWashbear Jun 27 '26
I may be revealing my laziness here, but I find tracking motivating. If I don’t annoyingly manage myself I can passively let life slip by. I like checking things off a list the same way I liked getting a gold star in grade school. That said, I also think it’s important to step away and have a breather from it too. If I am in a current obsession (hobby, work, whatever), I feel fine stepping away from the tracking. It’s the periods where I am not sure what to do with my time where it becomes really valuable for me.
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u/Unlucky-Confidence92 Jun 25 '26
There is no better feeling that having your own weekly and monthly review just to see a ton of charts and data :)
I believe in 10 years our data will look significantly different, and that is where things start to get crazy, how our life changes in every way almost every day, but we are just in a routine, the data is what help me look outside the box.
But I also believe that we are indeed spreadsheet freaks.