Measuring or tracking?

I’m just a little late to the Apple Watch game.

Just about a decade late.

But I’ve got one now (thanks for the great deal, Amazon Prime Days!), and here’s the first big difference I’ve noticed between it and the old Garmin watch I used to wear.

The Garmin watch tracked, and the Apple Watch measures.

The difference, at least for me, has been refreshing.

Before, I felt some pressure to keep a streak alive – like, say, hitting a certain number of steps in a day. Streaks in and of themselves aren’t bad things, and they can even help us develop and maintain good habits. But if the streak becomes more important than the habit, I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.

Here’s a quick example to help you understand where I’m coming from. Earlier in the year, The B99 and I took a trip up to New York City to visit our son. I had a daily streak in YouVersion (a Bible app) that was getting very close to 1,000. On the day we traveled to the Big Apple, we had to get up super early (like 3a), and then it was on until we finally crashed into the hotel bed late that night. It wasn’t until the next morning when I opened up YouVersion and saw a skinny “1” instead of a fat “989” that I realized what I’d done. Or, in this case, what I hadn’t done.

It’s sad to say, but I was more upset that I lost my streak than I was that I didn’t actually read the Bible. The tracker said I was good – and had been good every day for more than three years – but the measure of my heart in that moment revealed where I really was.

I think maybe we’re developing an unhealthy hunger to look good to the trackers without actually being good when we’re measured. So what if I can walk 10,000 steps a day for hundreds of days in a row? If I’m also still not sleeping well, not eating well, and not building up strength well, am I actually getting healthier? Or am I just moving in ways that make me think I am?

It seems to me, at least, that measurements work from the inside out, and trackers work from the outside in. I’ll take the first, please, and I’m thankful to have a device on my wrist that is helping me do just that.

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