I am on a twelve-day step streak. I have gotten at least ten thousand steps for twelve straight days. A streak I haven’t kept up since fall.
For the last three or four years, I’ve kept meticulous track of my steps. I rocked 2020 and 2021 was good, too. 2022 was the weakest.
Here’s the thing:
All I care about is the bottom line.
Did I get ten thousand on a given day.
And this morphed into a bigger goal.
Did I average ten thousand for every day.
What’s the point of a goal?
When ten thousand is a daily goal, you either make it or you don’t. It is cut and dry. Couldn’t be clearer.
It isn’t terribly useful, however.
Warning: Math
If I miss the goal four days out of a week, I’ve lost the week, right?
But what if I average 9,750 on the days I missed? That means, I’m down 1,000 steps.
And what if, on those three other days, I average 11,000?
For the week, I’m actually up two thousand steps.
And if this is an average week, I’m clearly hitting my goal.
I am holding multiple goals at once
- Obviously, I’m trying to get 10,000 steps a day.
- And I’m trying to get 70,000 steps a week.
- And I’m trying to get 365,000 steps a year.
These are all aligned and make sense.
Except when they conflict.
Winning the day can be counter-productive
It makes sense, of course. If you get 10,000 every day, you’ll meet the other two goals. So, if we focus on getting our steps each day, we can ensure that we get our steps everyday.
But when we focus on our daily performance, we can put ourselves in a slump. Like the ballplayer who goes hitless a couple times in a series. He gets in his head and by the end of the roadtrip, he struggles to get a hit.
The best hitters in baseball, however, go hitless often. They aren’t measuring failure by the singular event of each day. They measure across a season. In this way, measuring daily is worse than useless. It can be counter-productive.
The real value of tracking
I tracked the daily numbers because it was easy. Put it in a spreadsheet and it can tally them for you. Keep spreadsheets over the years and measure how you did over time.
I don’t use them that way. And the database approach is way too much. Because, in a sense, it’s collecting the wrong data.
I don’t care how many steps I walked on July 2, 2021.
It may be useful to examine behaviors around holidays or at different times of year, for sure. But this level of data-keeping doesn’t really help with that any more than what I’m doing now.
Too Much Data
I never cared about the numbers I was tracking. Accuracy is easy and gives a false sense of integrity.
It also has a way of creating brain fog.
When you’re staring at a spreadsheet full of four and five-digit numbers, do you really gain anything by tracking 9,782 steps?
Our brains need us to round them up or down to access the ability to relate them.
So all of that data I never go back to? It all looks like a mess to me. Not because I can’t understand it, but because it is a swarm of extra and meaningless accuracy.
I’m tracking weeks now.
Weeks are easier to maintain and the numbers give me more useful data.
And while I can’t see the outlier effect of having a day of traveling or one in which I’m stuck in meetings, it is useful to get a sense of how I’m managing those things in light of the whole week.
I also feel more in charge of my week and the habit. Not because I have to get to 10,000 today, but because I know where I’m at in the week. I got to 70,000 before the day started, so I’m still on track either way.
So what should I do?
The most useful thing about the 10,000 steps-a-day rule is that it tells you what to do today. Get 10,000 steps. The fact that there is no wiggle room is feature and bug.
Creating more wiggle room by focusing on the week can make it more likely I’ll complete the overall goal. Because I am more mindful of how I’m doing overall, not just today.
But it doesn’t give me the easy answer for today.
Keep the streak going, or don’t worry about it?
The obvious answer is to try.
But the reason the decision is more difficult is that I’ve neutralized the tiebreaker. The thing that makes making the decision easier. Not that the decision itself makes anything else easier, mind you.
It exposes the fact that we all operate with a decision matrix. It just so happens that we’ve isolated certain preferences to make decisions easier. But this doesn’t make them better.
Making decisions easier comes at a cost. And the cost, when it comes to habits like step-tracking is that it boosts one motivation (keep the streak going) by making us vulnerable to our other motivations. The ones that consider us as failures for not being perfect.
It is about motivation.
Not the tracking. The habit-forming. Even the goals themselves. Or the methods.
Why are we doing this? Why do we want to do this?
To move. Be healthy. Have a longer, more able life. Stay off medications. Better sleep and mental health. So many reasons why walking is better than sitting on the couch.
So what moves me? In the end, is that.
So what should I do? Go for a walk.
And what then will I do? Go for a walk.
How will I do this? By changing clothes. Putting on my running shoes. And stepping out the front door.