I stopped tracking my life

29 May, 2026

The Apple Watch genuinely helped me change my health and fitness for the better after I bought one in 2017. Closing rings, tracking workouts, monitoring progress, it worked extremely well for me.

And honestly, for a while some years, I enjoyed it. Even though I probably sometimes got a little too obsessed with closing my rings, very often no matter what. But over the years things slowly changed.

I got tired of having a display on my wrist all the time. Not because the Apple Watch is bad, but because it constantly pulls your attention somewhere else. Notifications, metrics, rings, trends, apps, settings, complications. Even when you disable most of it, the mindset somehow stays.

As I noticed this the first time in 2022, I switched to a Withings ScanWatch because I wanted something that looked more like a real watch again. The promise sounded like a match in heaven: I can have all the health tracking, but hidden inside a beautiful analog design.

In reality, this was a very early sign how much I missed wearing an actual watch.

Since then, I somehow kept circling around the same question and changed my setup constantly. I returned to the Apple Watch, just to return to Withings again. In hindsight, I spent an absurd amount of time and money on apps and devices that were supposed to help me track every second of my life and extract something meaningful out of all the data.

Last year I made the switch to an analog watch and decided to use the Apple Watch only for sleep and workout tracking. It was the right decision, but even though I wanted to believe otherwise, I wasn’t ready to let go of tracking all my data yet. Over the following weeks I slowly started wearing the Apple Watch more and more again, until I barely looked at my beautiful Laco anymore.

8 months later, I realized again, that I miss my analog watch. I decided to give Withings a final call and bought a ScanWatch Nova. It took me less than a month to realize that I hated even the tiny display on the watch. More importantly I learned, that I don't care about the data anymore. I barely looked at the data the ScanWatch collected.

A few years ago I was deeply into fitness progress monitoring, recovery scores, readiness metrics, HRV trends and all the things apps like Bevel or Athlytic tried to turn into daily guidance. I tested almost every app out there, but in the end all these charts didn't give me any value in return. I never felt satisfied and always was looking for improvements in my setup.

With these self-improvement apps, I also deleted my Strava account. And this week I decided to remove Komoot and Bergfex from my iPhone as well. At some point I simply stopped feeling the need to turn every experience into something measurable, shareable or comparable.

I think I simply reached the point where I got tired of constantly optimizing and comparing myself. I want experiences to feel like experiences again, not like data points inside another dashboard.

Two days ago I did my first hike in almost 10 years without a tracker, without recording the route, and it was awesome. For the first time, I even started wondering whether I need to track my workouts at all.

The only thing I still genuinely find useful is sleep tracking because sleep feels like the one metric that actually reflects your overall condition reasonably well. It’s less about optimizing every single day and more about seeing long-term patterns.

Resting heart rate, HRV, breathing patterns, sleep quality or just feeling constantly unrested can reveal that something is off long before you consciously notice it yourself.

And unlike most other tracking, it’s passive. I either rely on my Withings Sleep Analyzer ¹ or, if I need an alarm next morning, I wear my Apple Watch to bed ². I usually glance at the data for a few seconds in the morning and move on with my day and one of my beautiful watches on my wrist.

#blog