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I’ve spent the last 3+ years tracking 150+ personal metrics a day—from simple things like the number of calories I consumed to subjective measures like how focused I felt on a scale of 1-10. 

Whenever this comes up in conversation, the most common response is “But why??” 

(Actually, the most common response is: “You’re crazy,” followed by “But why??”)

Honestly, for a long time, I wouldn’t have been able to give you a simple answer. 

My gut felt like there was something I was reaching for by doing it—something that could change my life—but I wasn’t sure what that was.

Recently, I think I finally figured it out. 

And when I say it, it’ll sound simple, but it’s taken me years to really understand. 

In this email, I’ll finally explain why I track all these metrics, and how the philosophy that drives What Counts can help you live a more fulfilled life—regardless of whether you do the same.  

To explain, I need to take you back to 17th September 2024—my birthday. 

I’d just turned 24. 

For my last few birthdays, I've had a tradition of, based on how old I was, writing down that many life lessons from the year.

In other words, when I turned 24, I tried to write down 23 things I’d learned as a 23-year-old. 

Funnily enough, I only managed 11 on this occasion, but it didn’t really matter because the very first lesson I wrote down would change my life. 

Here’s how I put it at the time:

“1. When your values and actions don’t align, you lose self respect. When they do, you gain it.“

Sounds simple, right?

But it’s taken me a couple of years to really understand how much that philosophy drives the way I live, and how it has formed the basis of what we’re doing at What Counts.

In my mind, our lives can be split into two categories: our values and our actions. 

We all have a certain set of values. Our values tell us what’s important to us. What we prioritise. How we think we should treat others. How we think we should work. What we want to do with our lives. Who we wish we were. 

And then we all have, every single day, a set of actions. What we actually do on a day-to-day level. How we actually treat people. How we actually work. What we actually do with our lives. Who we actually are. 

The more closely our actions align with our values, the more fulfilled I think we tend to feel. 

We’ve probably all experienced this. 

It’s the reason we all love to set goals when January comes around. Setting New Year’s Resolutions is basically our way of saying, “Here is my new set of actions. If I do these actions, as opposed to the actions I was doing before, I will be closer to my true values.”

Or think about the cliche phrase: “I’m not living up to my potential”. This is simply another way of saying “my actions are falling short of my values.”

We might not think of these things in these terms, but I think we all have a gut sense of how closely our current way of life is aligning with our core values. The closer the two come, the more alive we feel. 

It’s that Hollywood-cliche scene where the aspiring film composer walks into her boss’s office and hands in her notice so she can follow her musical dreams. Suddenly, even though the future is uncertain, her life feels like it’s snapped back into focus. She’s brought her actions back in line with her values. 

We all want a little bit more of that feeling, even if that’s an extreme example. 

But how do we do that?

I think that’s unconsciously what I’ve been trying to figure out with What Counts and my daily metrics tracking. 

My mode of tracking has become my way of moving my life into ever closer alignment with my values. 

It’s a three-step system:

In order to align my actions and my values, I need to know what my values are.

The more precise I am about my values, the easier it will be for me to figure out how to achieve them. 

This could be as simple as literally trying to write down what’s important to me in life. 

Who are my friends? Which relationships do I want to look after and maintain? What do I want to do with my time? What are my top 10 priorities right now, and what order would I put them in? What do I want to achieve in my career?

Questions like this help me figure out what I’m aiming for in the first place. 

For example: If you were to ask me, I would say that getting good sleep and looking after my health is a high priority to me and one of my core values. To find this out, I make sure to track the time that I go to bed and wake up every day, along with my sleep quality. 

Another of my values is to try to do genuinely challenging creative work and contribute meaningfully to the industries I work in. But that’s quite an abstract concept so I tried to make it more measurable by tracking how much time each day I spend in ‘deep work’ mode—aiming for 3 hours a day. 

A final example: I value being a man of my word and doing the things I say I’ll do. But that’s another pretty abstract concept so I tried to make it more measurable by recording my daily to-do lists and then tracking what percentage of my to-do list I complete each day.

Hopefully, you get the idea. For all my values I try to create objective measures and ways I can log how close I come to them each day. This is why I ended up with 150+ things to measure each day—I kept coming up with more and more ways to turn values into data.  

The third step is the simplest: monitor my performance and course-correct where necessary. 

Perhaps I’ll go back over a month of data and see that my average bedtime is 3am (whoops.) This tells me my actions are currently far below where I want them to be for that particular value, and I make sure to place a renewed mental emphasis on keeping to a stricter schedule each day. 

Sometimes in reassessing the data, I’ll realise that maybe a value has changed. Perhaps I previously wanted to practice guitar for 60 minutes a day because music was high on my priority list, but it’s no longer as high so maybe I’ll adjust and shoot for 30 minutes a day instead. 

And sometimes it’s just nice to check in and see that I really am making positive progress. My diet really is cleaner this year than it was last year, which means my eating habits (actions) are more in line with my values (health.)

And that’s the whole process. 

Sure, it’s a bit more complicated than that—but if I haven’t lost you already, I definitely will if I try to go into more detail here and now. I’ll leave it at that for today’s email, but I definitely intend to come back to this topic. 

On the whole, it’s good to objectively see that I’m slowly, very slowly, moving my life in a positive direction. My actions are slowly but surely becoming more aligned with my values. And that makes all the effort of tracking it all worth it. 

So to answer the question I started this email with—”But why track all this??”—it’s because I think it’s good for me. 

And who knows? Maybe it could be good for you too.   

I hope you enjoyed the insight. This is really a big part of the ‘why’ behind What Counts and why we do what we do! 

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Your friends,

Benji and Jacob