[SoftTalker]

How did people manage before smartphones?

GPS: Garmin, or use a map.

Payments: use a card, or cash.

Car keys: use the keys that came with the car.

House keys: Carry them with you, or get a keypad lock.

Lights: use the switch on the wall

Health tracker: notebook and pencil

[TeMPOraL]

Don't forget that technology has a ratchet effect. It's gonna get worse over time.

> Payments: use a card, or cash.

The card part ends up requiring phone confirmation as a second factor, often online, occasionally offline.

> Health tracker: notebook and pencil

Convenience matters - notebook and pencil method cuts down people benefiting from health tracking by a couple orders of magnitude.

[vonjuice]

> Convenience matters - notebook and pencil method cuts down people benefiting from health tracking by a couple orders of magnitude.

How?

[TeMPOraL]

Take sleep tracking: I tried and failed to note those times when I wake up. I'm usually too foggy to remember, and later in the day, it's too much effort to reverse the times out of environmental cues. Obviously, I don't have a consistent sleep schedule - otherwise, I wouldn't care about tracking it in the first place. And, of course, manual tracking doesn't work when I wake up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep an hour later, because half the time I don't remember it happened until next afternoon. However, my smartwatch is able to record all that for me, with 95+% accuracy, which over the past year or two gave me some important data to contextualize my day-to-day energy levels.

Or take pressure monitoring. My whole life, I've been suffering from acute chronic cannot-form-a-habit-to-save-my-life-itis, (now also known as "treatment-resistant part of my ADHD"). There's no way in hell I can stick to daily (or worse, less frequent) measurements using cuff-style upper arm monitor. It may be portable, battery-powered, trivial to use, but it's still too much of a hassle. What I can do is use it to recalibrate my smartwatch every couple weeks, and use that to take measurements - I still can't form a habit, but at least something I can do within couple seconds of remembering it. So, thanks to the watch, I get some data, where otherwise I'd have none, and that's all because of convenience factor.

Or just look at the popularity of fitness bands and watches. Some people derive value from those automatic measurements. Of those people, many (most) wouldn't otherwise bother if they had to use a stopwatch and a notebook instead.

[vonjuice]

I'm not so much interested in how difficult it is to track something as whether the data and its granularity maps out onto real change.

I went through periods of wanting to make changes in my life, and I thought it was all about figuring out a perfect system.

It turned out that the bigger problem was actually overthinking, and it was that overthinking itself which wanted more data and more methods.

In actuality, what helped was removing as much friction as possible. I have no data about my sleep except for the clear fact that I wake up earlier and spend almost no time rolling around my bed before getting out of it. I don't need either a watch or paper to tell me that.

I don't say that as a way of critiquing your methods, just wondering if you notice real, considerable change as a result, the kind that you don't need to minutely keep track of because it's so obvious.

Or to make it not personal, is there a known correlation between the popularity of fitness tracking devices and significant weight loss across populations?

[allthecybers]

What if your car key is a smartphone app or a card in your wallet? Those were the keys that came with my car.