Track less, live more: a case against life-logging

📈 When you're too busy tracking your life, you may forget to actually live it

The first time I took an airplane flight was to pick strawberries 🍓 in Norway in the summer of 2008 . It was the Scandinavian Airlines flight SK4799, departing from Krakow at 10:25 AM and heading for Oslo. If I know this very precisely after 15 years, it’s because I have this flight, and every single flight I took since that day, logged in an app.

My flights are in flightradar, books read in Goodreads, movies watched in letterboxd, workouts in Strava. Reading notes are everywhere (book margins, Logseq, loose pieces of paper, Google Docs). Confused morning thoughts are in a paper journal.

The quantified self

This habit of tracking life activities is called lifelogging. The premise is that we collect data about ourselves, so that we can extract useful insights from it: How do I spend my time? What types of books I like? How is my running stamina changing over time?

Ideally, we use these insights to improve something: find new ways to manage time, get better book recommendations, etc. This part is where the idea meets reality.

The reality check

After logging 1K+ of various events, I found three issues with all that tracking:

• it’s tedious. Any logging that requires a manual step ends up feeling like a chore, no matter how small the friction is.

• it’s self-obsessed. Each tracking ritual feeds on and fuels the idea that the little activities of my life are so important they deserve to be recorded for posterity or analysed for insights.

• it’s futile. Just like I rarely look at the countless photos I take on my smartphone, I almost never use the logged data for anything other than pure vanity – looking at the list of books I read as a little trophy of the mind.

At its worst, lifelogging feels like building altars of personal vanity. Can it be satisfying? Yes. Is it a healthy habit? I’m not sure. When logging becomes a vanity project or a chore, it sucks out the energy and time we could use to do something more worthwhile.

Conclusion

When I’m too busy tracking life metrics 📈, I feel I’m forgetting to actually live it.

The core idea of collecting data for “future use” is problematic: we can track anything, so we do, amassing impressive collection of data points without a sense for what it would be useful for.

Track less, live more.

Postcard from Paris

Cinema Paradiso is a free movie festival screening films in the courtyard of the Louvre. Great setting to discover Fellini’s 8½. After watching the movie, I diligently logged it in letterboxd…

Have a great week 💫,
– Przemek