the things that tempt you towards trouble become considerably less tempting, and that’s the vital point here—tracking your behavior, without striving to change it, gently reduces the amount of willpower and self-scolding required to do the right thing.

These abandoned trials leave us feeling guilty and powerless, and convinced that the high road is the harder one.

It forces you to recognize that you are free and have always been, but that you can’t escape responsibility for how you use that freedom, whether or not you choose to be aware of it.

You can always quit tracking, of course. But after doing it for even a short time, you can’t quit without knowing you’re choosing to live in the dark. It really feels like a conscious decision to be less happy. But in a few months, when you’re fed up with being less happy—again—you know what to do.

Breakthroughs come from awareness, not from willpower or “grit”, or any other forceful qualities we never have enough of. They come from understanding our behavior, not from policing it.  

Awareness makes stagnation impossible

Tracking without striving allows us this vital freedom to overindulge sometimes, to give ourselves a break—to be human, in other words. But as long as you’re tracking the reality of your behavior, there’s no way you’ll do it every day.

Just recording the numbers—without striving to change anything about what you’re tracking—almost always creates a sustainable, healthy transition to a better way of doing things.

Keeping aware of dollars actually spent, hours actually worked, miles actually run—changes what you want to do. You can easily spot the places where it’s easy to make progress, and where it’s too difficult to force things right now. The high cost of certain habits becomes too obvious for them to remain very tempting.