Any video gamer knows that your status bar is one of the most important things that you need to pay attention to.

The information it provides you is vital. You need to know how much health you have left, for example, so that you can use your limited health kits to your maximum advantage.

No serious gamer would want or be able to perform at a high level of competition without his status bars- many of them (in World Of Warcraft, for example) actually use additional plugins that provide them with additional information about their in-game statistics.

Every one of those bars and charts and meters provides information that the player interprets and processes to make the optimal decisions he needs to make. If so much information processing is needed to play a video game at a high level, what about daily life?

I started keeping a journal of sorts in January, but it had no real purpose. I would scribble random nonsense from time to time. I’m not entirely sure why I even started.

Over time, interestingly, the journal started to sort of develop a life of it own. I started keeping track of how many cigarettes I was smoking a day, how much money I was spending, who I was meeting, what I was doing. I was started to put together a sort of “status bar” of my daily life. It just sort of naturally happened. Things that were at the back of my mind, that I never normally notice, started revealing themselves.

There wasn’t any magical transformation though. It wasn’t particularly groundbreaking or life-changing, and it never lasted very long. I would have one-to-two week periods during which I would keep track of my activities, followed by blank spaces and pages. Over time, these blank pages began to bother me, and I found myself filling them up with increasing frequency.  And, on hindsight, that’s how the magic happens. That little niggling feeling that bothers you, which you didn’t have before. It’s kind of like getting hungry, or needing to pee- you end up giving in to it without even really thinking about it.

Slowly, patterns would start to arise. The numbers couldn’t lie. I started to notice that I was exceptionally unproductive during periods of time when I stayed up late, for instance.

I started to develop a fitness routine- nothing complicated, just a commitment to going to the gym and hitting the weights every 3 days- and I found it incredibly fulfilling. I started spending significantly less money- I found myself taking fewer cab rides, smoking less. My random notes and scribblings started to almost naturally coalesce into gradually neater and more organized calendars and charts, growing more refined each month. I didn’t even feel like I was doing anything out of the ordinary, it was so subtle.

It’s really neat! If you’ve been wanting to enact some reform in your personal life but don’t know where to begin, I highly recommend starting by keeping track of your day-to-day life. I mean, if you were running a business, you wouldn’t make any big decisions without first paying attention to the statistics- how much of your product you’re selling, who your customers are, et cetera. I should think that the same applies to your personal life.

TL;DR:

1: Keeping track of your day-to-day life allows you to become more conscious of what’s going on. If you were a CEO of a business, keeping track of things is like taking a look at your accounting spreadsheets and listening to customer feedback.

2: Once you become more conscious of what’s going on, you automatically begin to adjust your behaviour, without even realizing it. It simply feels like the natural thing to do.

3: Spend just a few minutes on it every day. You’ll surprise yourself within a month.