What is the balance of your bank account?
It’s a personal question, but I’m willing to bet you know the answer.
We all know roughly how much we have in the bank.
Because it’s important to know.
It’s impossible to budget, or save, or make big purchases without knowing how much money is in our banks.
It’s a prerequisite to good financial management. And it’s something that we all keep track of without even thinking about it.
Because before you go about understanding or improving something, you need to have a baseline measurement of where you’re currently at.
This is something that most people understands with money.
But that far fewer people seem to understand in other areas of life.
I started using a spreadsheet to track different parts of my life, similar to the way many track their financials.
The spreadsheet contains habits around tracking my work, exercise, sleep, diet, and water intake.
A couple of people have asked about the spreadsheet and suggested that it might be overkill to track my life in such granular detail. I’m a data guy, though. Without compiling this data, I can’t get an accurate picture of progress and changes and how they are benefitting my life.
I think it’s necessary and hugely beneficial. Here’s why:
If you don’t track your sleep, it’s next to impossible to know how much actual sleep you’re getting each night. And without knowing that, you can’t make lifestyle changes to improve your sleep quality and quantity. There are many ways you can accurately track your sleep. Most smart watches will track it for you.
If you don’t track the food you put into your body, any weight-loss or weight-gain goal is reduced to pure guesswork. You’re also unable to keep track of what foods affect your energy levels, and whether or not you’re eating a healthy balance of foods over a prolonged period.
If you’re a knowledge worker, self-employed, or somebody responsible for planning your own day, the benefits of tracking the time you spend working are hard to overstate. As well as understanding which tasks take the most time within your working day (and finding efficiencies accordingly), you can also work out at what point in the day your willpower falls over, and plan your schedule to match.
My smart watch is used for recording how much water I drink.
Here’s the thing:
You might already be getting lots of high-quality sleep, eating the right amounts of nutritious foods, drinking enough water, and getting the optimal amount of work done each day.
But you might not be.
Without generating some sort of data, you will literally never know.
Hold yourself accountable to objective measures.
It makes doing the right thing far easier to track and manage. And stops you falling into the overdraft of your health, productivity and wellness.
