I heard a long time ago that the best way to live life is to write down things that you love to do, and just do those things more often. So I took that same mindset and applied it to mind/body/spirit. My first question was, how do I know if the things I’m doing to improve my life are actually making my life better? It’s really easy to understand how you feel in any given moment, but really hard to understand how you’ve felt a week ago.
So in researching how to best do this, I took inspiration from Rob Dyrdek’s own personal journey of building out a daily tracker. If you want to learn more about his tracker, check out his podcast (link). Episode 30 is a great reference (link).
Build Your Own Tracker
So after building, testing, and mastering the first version of my tracker system, I thought, I should share my knowledge with the world so that others can get the same benefits I have, without as much leg work. I’m going to do a series about this, so that I can deep dive on each step, reducing the friction to implement your own system.
The most important thing: you have to put in the work, and tune it to you. If this were a car, I can tell you which suspension to buy, but you have to dial it in for the right ride for you.
So you want to start your own daily tracker, eh? Here’s what you can expect:
- A place to capture your thoughts and feelings each day
- Something you can build out dashboards and more importantly, capture consistent data to see how you’re progressing or to figure out the little things that make your day better.
- Thoughts into numbers (less writing, more selecting)
- Upfront work, minimal sustained effort
- Long term data on how you feel and the ability to see larger trends in your life based on individual moments summarized
Phase 1: Step 1
Hey you gotta get started somewhere right? Well the first step is to figure out what you want to track. We’ll build our system to be flexible, but when you’re working with data, consistency is key so getting it as close as you can the first time will pay dividends later.
As far as what you should track depends on what your goal is. I’m not talking about a goal like “lose 10 pounds” but more of “I want to be happier,” or “I want to spend more time with my family.” Think big overall goals that can be hard to track if you’re even making any progress towards. For me, I wanted data to see what things I tried ultimately led to measurable improvements to my life. I also happen to love the idea of spreadsheets and graphs, so capturing data on my life was also intriguing.
Once you have an overarching reason to begin (again, it doesn’t have to be ‘solving world hunger’ big) the next thing is to see what do you want to track each day? What questions do you want to know the answers to each day?
Phase 1: Step 2
Now it’s time to come up with questions. I would highly encourage you to think of your questions in two distinct forms:
- Ranking Questions
- Yes/No Questions
Ranking Questions
Ranking questions are things such as, “on a scale between 1-10, my day was a [blank].” These questions are super important because they do the heavy lifting of taking something subjective, such as how your day is, and quantifying it; this is a huge step in capturing data that can be useful in visualizations and archiving your life for future review. You ask a few different types of these together, and you can sum them to get a score. So now you can take different attributes and add them to determine how different things in your life impact different aspects of your day.
I have four main ranking questions I ask myself everyday on a scale of 1-10 (10 being best)
- Work: How do I feel like my work life is going? Did I have a good day? For consistency, I will use the “work” attribute on the weekends as either something I’m working on personally that’s a bit professional/personal growth related, or just try to maintain the score from Friday all weekend. It’s not a perfect science, but it works for me.
- Life: How’s life treating me today? Did I have a good day with relationships, do I feel good, am I getting out what I put in?
- Health: This is pretty simple, but do I feel healthy? Did I feel like I made smart healthy choices today? Am I sick?
- Energy: Am I sluggish or could I fight a lion? Did I have energy throughout the day or did I crash?
These questions are the main baseline for the tracker. I use these to capture the attributes I think encapsulate what it means for me to know how my day is. My main goal was to keep it concise but deep enough. I can’t take a 30 question quiz everyday, but I want more than just one metric. I’m not suggesting these are the best, but they work for me.
This system will work if you have one ranking question or 50. The total number of ranking questions doesn’t matter and only impacts the total score we’ll calculate later (which doesn’t matter). You can use a scale of 1-10, 1-5, 1-3, or really what ever you want; it just has to be a number scale. For me, 1-10 worked well where it gave me enough variety without being overwhelming; 7 is a common answer for me lately that I wouldn’t have been able to capture in a 1-5 scale (because “7” in a 1-10 is a “3.5” in 1-5 which removes the purpose of a 1-5 scale).
Yes/No Questions
Yes/No questions do a similar task, but allow you to definitively track whether you did something on that particular day. The reason we want yes/no questions is that they are binary in that they only have two outcomes, something really important in the development of a system to capture data. I can’t begin to describe how difficult it is to make sense of word-based submissions. If these are fields you can write anything in, you can almost get nothing out.
These are useful questions to determine the impact actions you take have on your scores. Examples could be “Did I take my dog for a walk?” if you believe walking your dog leads to a better quality of life. The big thing here is: you don’t have to KNOW that these things make your day better. The more of these questions you have, the more data you can capture to determine HOW these things impact you.
My yes/no questions are focused on tracking a secondary metric to determine how those things impacted my overall scores (see ranked questions). Can I notice a pattern between going outside and better scores? This is the real power in these questions for this type of tracking; HOW do these things impact me. My questions focus on:
- Did I Have Quality Time with Kids
- Did I Have Quality Time with Wife
- Did I Exercise?
- Did I Eat Well?
- Did I Read?
- Did I Meditate?
- Did I Wake Up Before 6AM?
- Did I Go Outside?
- Did I Take Sleep Supplements?
- Did I Take a Cold Shower?
As you can see, I ask a lot of questions. But the beauty is, because these are yes/no questions, they are super fast to answer. I try to be really honest on whether I did those things that day (or in some instances the night before). It’s also a great reminder of the things each night that I think are important to do in my life. To be clear, I haven’t taken a cold shower since December 14! See what I did though? That’s the freaking power of this stuff, I can look at the last time I did something I thought was important. Extreme ownership and tracking.
We’ll get into this later in the series, but you can build these out so that when you select a yes/no question in your visualization, you can SEE how these impact your score. Crazy stuff.
Phase 1: Homework
So, are you ready? Well the first step is to write down what you want to track. What matters to you? What do you think will help you become the person you always knew you were?
Look, having a support group and friends who will be there for you is fundamental to life, but holding your self accountable AND being your biggest champion is the key. This process has helped me approach growth and challenge OBJECTIVELY and allowed me to take some of the human element out of my own way; after all, these are just numbers.
As a famous orator once said:
Men lie, women lie, numbers don’t.
Jay Z
Phase 2: Preview
In the next part of the series, we’ll visit creating a Google Form and connecting that to the correct parts of the ecosystem to make this whole system work. It gets more technical (fun) from here people.
Additional Resources
See the 2023 breakdown of my system and the things I learned here (Link)
Rob Dyrdek’s Podcast (link)