Track and Measure

8 min readApr 23, 2023

Key to Skill Acquisition

Tracking your practice and measuring progress is perhaps one of the main reasons why high-achievers can do everything that they do. The stories of sudden inspiration hitting you, which then leads to something amazing are overrated. The absolute majority of the amazing things people do are thanks to consistent effort over a long time. And whatever it is that you do, if you do it for a long enough time, you cannot just rely on your memory to plan, design and implement your improvement plan — whatever your field of choice is.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” — Peter Drucker

Do you need to study for an exam? Do research for a project? Do you exercise? Are you preparing for a competition? Learning a language? Practicing playing a musical instrument? Do you want to improve your sleeping habits or your diet?

Whatever your objective, tracking and measuring is a sure way to boost your progress. If you are not already doing it, you are missing out. Here are a few reasons why you should do it:

It allows you to have evidence of what you do and fact-based feedback on your performance, which is important, because:
It helps stay motivated. Seeing the evidence of moving forward over time helps us stay on track. Nothing motivates as progress.
It helps identify areas that need work. This is particularly useful when we feel we are plateauing.
It helps set and calibrate goals. As you measure progress over time, you can decide whether you want to set realistic or ambitious goals. You can decide what adjustments to make along the way. Either way, you can do that based on evidence.

Whether your objective is to lose weight or to gain muscle, to get stronger or faster, to become a better chess player or a musician, a lawyer, or a martial artist, it helps to have objective information at your disposal about your practice and your progress. Our brains tend to lie to us, giving us a false impression about how much work we have done. We might feel we have done more than what we have actually done. Tracking your work brings clarity and objectivity to the process. It helps avoid unnecessary wondering about how you are doing and simplifies decision-making on what your next steps should be.

Also, in today’s world, a lot of us do more than one thing. If you do two or more activities, say learning a language and exercising, keeping mental track of your progress becomes all the harder. Do not overload your brain, track and measure!

So how should you keep track of your practice and progress?

The first thing is to decide on the metric you are going to measure.

What quantitative or qualitative elements will you track? Some things are easier to track than others. For example, weightlifting is a perfect activity for tracking. But in piano practice, it is difficult to reflect the qualitative elements of training. So as a minimum, make sure to track what is quantifiable. How often do you do the activity, and for how long? You can also add comments about how you felt; if something needs more work; any other thoughts and ideas you have during the practice that you might want to note down.

How many elements are you going to monitor? Depending on how many elements you track, you can identify patterns in your performance and make adjustments that lead to improved performance. For example, you may realize that you perform better when you practice in the morning, or that you struggle with a specific technique and need to spend more time on it.

If you are still struggling to choose, here is a rule of thumb for choosing the metric — it should help you make decisions. If it doesn’t help you with decisions, drop it.

Make sure not to overly complicate things. If you have not tracked your activity before, start with the simplest possible measurements. At the initial stage, the goal is to make it a habit, not to overload yourself with a complex method that you won’t maintain.

Here is an example of what data I keep about my kettlebell workouts. I keep track of:

the dates of the workout, which tell me how often I train in between Brazilian jiu-jitsu and home (calisthenics) workouts;
the types of exercises, how many sets and reps I do;
the weights I use for each exercise, set, and rep.
Comments, for example — left shoulder hurts, need to review the technique for exercise X, feel tired today, felt very comfortable — can increase the weights next time and so on. Whatever helps you figure out how to move forward.

For language learning, I have experimented with different methods. One method I enjoyed is Robin McPherson’s tracking sheets (check out here).

I would recommend separating your planning from tracking what you end up doing. Putting both together can make things messy and confusing.

One thing that is very important though — DO NOT BE A SLAVE TO DATA. Be careful, because it is easy to lose track of what you are trying to achieve. The numbers alone don’t account for successful outcomes. I can do ten piano practice sessions, but if I am not very serious in every one of those, I won’t be moving forward. Don’t just mindlessly do things to score points on your tracking tool. Chasing statistics is a poor strategy. Try to do deliberate practice (the term popularized by Anders Ericsson in his book Peak, my takeaways here).

Second, decide on the tool you will use to do the tracking.

A simple notebook? An Excel sheet? An app? If you use paper, fine, though analysis is easier with digital tools some of which come with in-built analytics. You can use Evernote or other note-taking apps to scan and digitize your paper-based information.

What tool you use is not of huge importance, as long as it works for you, and to repeat, as long as it is not too much work. Don’t spend too much time designing a perfect tracking system. As you do it, you are going to make changes anyway. So start with a simple layout. Then as you go, change, add or subtract things as you see fit.

For example, here is the Excel table I have used for the last several years with slight modifications:

As you can see, every day, I track:

My waking hour and the hour I go to sleep.
Spanish practice, which includes: a page from the Spanish version of the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday, and two entries into a Stoic Diary, then whatever reading and watching/listening I do in Spanish.
Exercise — typically Brazilian jiu-jitsu, home (calisthenics), and kettlebell workouts. Sometimes I might do cycling, sprints, swimming or something else.
Reading — what book I read, how many pages per day;
Writing — when I do the first draft of my articles and when I post them;
Piano practice.

I have experimented with tracking my activities in a paper notebook and apps, but frankly, none worked for me. Excel seems to do the trick and I purposefully keep it simple.

Notice the use of green color — it signifies the completion of an activity. So every time I finish a book, or a TV series in Spanish for example, I mark that cell in green. I do the same for every 5 workout sessions. Seeing green color throughout the table gives me a quick visual sense of how I am doing.

Very important! Decide where you are going to store the data. Back it up!

Thirdly, decide if you are going to make tracking public or keep it private.

In today’s era of social media, a lot of people make their practice session information and progress public. It is fine, as long as it serves to motivate you and help you progress. But it does not work for everyone. I like to keep it private, for example. Even if you keep it private, tracking is still very motivating — see the example of my use of green color in the Excel tracker. It is also helping me avoid laziness, every time there is a stretch of empty cells for a particular activity, I have a strong urge to do something about it. This is an example of how tracking helps maintain discipline — even if no one else sees it, you don’t want to look bad to yourself.

Fourth, this is so important I will say it again — keep things simple.

If you are spending too much energy on tracking, rather than the actual practice and learning, that is not a very smart way to spend your time and effort.

That’s it.

One of the comments I sometimes get when explaining my approach to tracking and measuring — does this make things robotic and boring?

Not at all! There is the minimum I take upon myself to do and tracking helps me monitor the consistency of my practice and learning. Of course, if you feel like doing a crazy intense practice session, significantly more than what you had initially planned to do — by all means. Tracking is not for blocking that. It is to provide a foundation for such inspiration-filled sessions, building on the skills you acquire throughout weeks, months, and years of practice. I have discussed this dichotomy between systematic, disciplined, and routine work and the creative outbursts in my article Work Like a Lion or Work Like a Mule.

I don’t believe in suddenly emerging brilliant products and performance, but rather that such things are based on long-term, often invisible hard work. For me, discipline is the foundation, a prerequisite for creative work. All creative individuals use a systematic approach in their practice. From Mozart to da Vinci, from Roger Federer to Michael Jordan, every genius in their respective domain has paid their dues in terms of years upon years of hard work and grueling practice. Disciplined and consistent work is the foundation for creative brilliance.

So get on it, track, measure, and of course, don’t forget to have fun.

If you want to read more on strategies for skill acquisition and learning, I would recommend:

Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole, my takeaways here
Deep Work by Cal Newport, my takeaways here
Atomic Habits by James Clear, my takeaways here
Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink
Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday
Getting Things Done by David Allen, my takeaways here
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin

If you are keen to explore such subjects more, check out some of my articles that you might find interesting:

Track and Measure

Written by Rational Badger