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Build Your Freedom

Gathering and sharing knowledge, systems, tactics, and hacks to build a lifestyle of creative, financial, and mental freedom.

Tracking your life is trapping your life

The productivity paradox

7 min readJul 17, 2025

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Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

It’s the golden age of productivity.

With a few taps on your phone, you can get hundreds of incredible tools: habit trackers, to-do list apps, timers, journals, note-taking apps…

If you don’t like to be digital, just hop to Amazon or Etsy and you’ll have thousands of fancy journals to choose from. The list is so long that your head will start to spin like a dog trying to catch its tail.

What a time!

That’s brilliant: we can measure, quantify, and track our lives with precision, we can optimise ourselves into models of efficiency and design a life of freedom and accomplishment.

A dream for a scientist like who spends his days measuring as precisely as possible everything, getting as much data as possible, then analysing all this to find patterns.

So it makes sense, doesn’t it?

Yes… and no.

We’re not talking about science here: it’s your life!

Do the very tools meant to liberate us end up keeping us on a treadmill of busyness?

Is granular self-tracking the key to productivity, or is it an energy-draining chore with a surprisingly low return on investment (ROI)?

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Build Your Freedom
Build Your Freedom

Published in Build Your Freedom

Gathering and sharing knowledge, systems, tactics, and hacks to build a lifestyle of creative, financial, and mental freedom.

Frank Elda
Frank Elda

Written by Frank Elda

Follow my journey to build your financial, creative, and mental freedom 👉👉👉 https://frankelda.substack.com/

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