#10 Start Tracking Whatever You Want to Improve

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We all want to improve our lives. Build new skills and habits, eat healthily and exercise, become more productive and waste less time, and be a good family member and friend. We often get so motivated and start doing things that help us achieve all those goals, but most of the time, after that initial spark of motivation is gone, we find ourselves back where were when we started. And we lose trust in ourselves and we usually do nothing about it. This is frustrating and depressing, and sometimes we wish there could be something that could help us achieve our goals. Well it turns out, there is something you can do that would definitely help you improve whatever area of your life you want to improve and that is Tracking.

Any big success or change is a series of small improvements that are compounded over time. Read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear if you want to know more about that. We cannot expect ourselves to wake up one-day morning and do something so massive and earth-shattering that would make everything fall into place and make us instantly successful. What we can do is to make small improvements to what we are currently doing and keep repeating it until it compounds together to produce a result that you wanted.

If you want to fix your morning and night routine and you want to wake up and sleep early, you can go to bed an hour earlier and wake up an hour earlier than you would normally do. If you want to become more productive at work, you can spend some extra few hours a day working. But the problem is that you would successfully complete a couple of days with small improvements, maybe a week, but then you lose track of the things and you stop making further improvements. As a result, you get easily fallen into your old place and everything you were doing would seem to make no difference at all.

This is where tracking can come to save us. Tracking the time or efforts or the repetitions or whatever that you can do to improve a certain area of your life would enable us to see clearly where we are making progress, where we are stuck and where were are getting weaker. It can help you determine what you should on doing more and less each day and give can give you a sense of control over your life as well.

I have been doing this for quite a long time now. I track the time I wake up and go to bed each day, I track the time I spend on working each day and I track my workouts and the food I eat every day. There are some key factors you should keep in mind while doing this and I will write about that in another article.

What do you want to improve in your life? What can you do to make that happen? Start tracking them.

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