What Four Years of Tracking My Life Actually Taught Me

At the beginning of 2025 I wrapped up a four-year experiment. I tracked every single minute of my life.

All of it. 

Work, sleep, skydiving, reading, eating… even the 106 hours I spent playing board games in 2024. 35,064 hours logged across 25 categories.

I started the experiment because I thought more information would give me more clarity. I believed that if I could finally see where my time was going, I would make better decisions about how to use it.

That isn’t what happened.

The experiment taught me far less about time and far more about the stories we tell ourselves about time and data.

The First Lesson: The measuring itself took far more time than I realized. Seventeen activity switches a day. Ten seconds per log. More than nine hours a year just tracking my own life. Plus additional hours creating dashboards and charts. All while telling myself I didn’t have enough time.

The Second Lesson: The data didn’t reveal anything my gut didn’t already know. I didn’t need charts to tell me where I was stretched thin or investing energy in the wrong places. I had felt those things long before I graphed them.

The Third Lesson: Tracking my life didn’t change my life. I made small adjustments, but nothing meaningful. I was still avoiding decisions I didn’t want to face and telling myself the data would eventually push me to act. I was documenting my life instead of improving it.

Ending the experiment forced me to sit with a simple fact. Information doesn’t create change. Ownership does.

As this year winds down, my focus is not on how to track more, measure more, or optimize more. Instead, I’m focusing on the shift I already know I need to make but have been avoiding.

So here’s the question I’m asking myself this week: What part of my life have I been analyzing instead of changing?

P.S. On Thursday I’ll be sharing the leadership insights this experiment revealed about metrics.