Un-quantified Self

On quitting my Fitbit and realigning my walking goals.

Disneyland, February 2022.

In the year and a half that Fitbit tracked my steps, the two days with the highest step count logged both took place at Disneyland. One in mid-February 2022 on my birthday, and one in early May of that same year as part of a hybrid Palm Springs/Disneyland girls’ trip. I exceeded 25k steps each of those days, and unsurprisingly, neither of those were days in which I cared particularly much about how many steps I was getting.

That made those days an exception in other ways as well. From December 2021 to May 2023, I put my Fitbit on almost every single day, and most days, I was averaging 7-8k steps. It drove behavior that on the surface, seemed positive – after all, I was getting out and walking, right? Despite that debunked 10,000 step myth that informed Fitbit’s default step goals, surely this was creating a habit loop for me to get outside more. Wasn’t that good?

The answer is complicated.

A promising start

I bought my Fitbit back in late December 2021, and I think a few factors were at play. I’d recently moved into a new apartment (finally escaping That Mouse! A reprise to that story will come one day…) which I had chosen primarily for its proximity to the Golden Gate Park. Living in Nob Hill had been fine, even great at times, when I’d been regularly walking to an office, and also regularly going out, but the pandemic changed that. I was eager to be in a neighborhood that was vastly more walkable, and had access to the greenery and space that I craved.

But a few months after settling into the new place, I didn’t feel like I was exploring the park as much as I “should’ve.” A different branch of the story here is about how I had returned to product management as a full-time job, and was once again feeling pulled into work at the expense of other parts of my life — but that’s for another time too. The point was, I knew I wanted to change my behavior and go for more walks.

You know that window in late December that gets proliferated with post-holiday deals, and every ad has a New Year, New You haze to it? Target had a $30 discount on the entry-level Fitbit tracker, and I went for it. A fully fledged smartwatch was out of the question — I did not need more ways for notifications to follow me — so this little device seemed to fit the bill. As I refreshed the delivery tracking page, eager to see that “Out for Delivery” status, I developed a real impatience with the walks taken at the time — like somehow it was a waste of time if steps weren’t being counted. In hindsight it was probably a bad sign that I internalized Tracking Mentality before the actual device was even on my wrist.

When it arrived midday on December 30, 2021, I put it on and set my goal steps to 8,500. That first day, I only managed to reach 425 steps on the Fitbit, and I remember feeling a little bummed out that I’d already failed to reach the goal. The next day I hit 16,000 steps. This is a good predictor of how this device would come to color my perspective on what walking was for.

But for a while, it did exactly what I hoped it would do. I felt a sense of accomplishment at seeing the number of steps go up throughout the day, and began mentally assigning a value to certain outings around my neighborhood. 2,000 to get to the grocery store and back. 4,000 or so to the botanical gardens and around my usual loop. In the early days, I took meandering walks around the residential neighborhood, only to be disappointed at the 1,000 or so steps that accumulated, so I stopped exploring as much there.

Hitting 8,500 every day felt great. And I was actually discovering some new landmarks in the neighborhood. After a few weeks, my loop around the botanical garden during the late winter gloom got stale, and I decided to walk a little further into Golden Gate Park to see what was on the north side of JFK Drive. It turned out to be Stow Lake (+5,000 steps), which I had never visited despite a decade of living in San Francisco.

I also started to take photos on my walks, sending them to coworkers and friends, sharing all the new plants and views I was finding. Getting my steps in served as a great excuse to get outside in the middle of a workday, or to take a break from my work before it got too dark to walk. That I felt like I needed an excuse at all speaks more to my relationship to work and productivity than the power of the Fitbit itself, but like I alluded to before, I wouldn’t really unpack that until later. For a while I even got up earlier for morning walks before the workday started — hitting 4,000 before lunch felt amazing, and gave me more buffer so that my end of day walks wouldn’t have to be so extensive (“More time to keep working!” said my burnt-out brain).

A slippery slope

Gradually, Fitbit steps started to augment the way I saw my days and activities. I had logged those 25k steps during a day at Disneyland (yay!). I logged under 1,000 steps/day during the week I had COVID (boo! for lots of reasons but a critical boo for missing step goals). Roller-skating didn’t track steps in the same way as walking, so while I was happy to be spending time at the skate rink in the park, I was always a little let down by the number of steps accrued (including the walk to/from it, I barely met the daily goal). My weeklong vacation to Tulum, where I mostly read books by the pool and had a phenomenal time(!), was undercut by a sense that I had created an extended streak of ‘missed’ days by only getting ~4,000/day.

Without realizing it, step-tracking had changed from a tool to incentivize going outside, a thing that I actively wanted encouragement to do, to a framework of judging whether I had done ‘enough’ each day. Some days it even functioned as a deterrent to walking — if it was getting late and I knew that I couldn’t hit my step goal, why bother even going for a walk at all?

It had become this lingering background radiation to my daily routine — take my Fitbit off to shower, put it back on as soon as I dried off, check my wrist every hour or so to gauge progress, start feeling guilt when the sun set if I hadn’t managed to meet my step goal for the day. And I might’ve continued to tolerate this, except that I started to cultivate awareness in another way.

A shifting perspective

Like a lot of folks, I was laid off last year. During an extended time of rest and reset, I started taking some drawing classes, connected with more mindfully-oriented people, and joined a community of creatives at The Ruby where I found a lot of support for these murky questions I was asking myself about meaning and purpose. Along with all this, I revisited Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, which I had read back in the early pandemic but had not really internalized or understood how to connect to my life.

All of this was teaching me the importance of paying attention and maintaining awareness and connection to my senses.

And because of this, I started noticing a weird friction during some walks these last few months. The botanical garden has been newly in bloom, sprung to life after the months of rain earlier this year. I had developed a curiosity around bird song and identifying specific plants and trees, and I found myself wanting to stop and listen and look.

But I felt this pull from the device on my wrist, almost like an impatient toddler.

“Are we there yet?”

“We’re walking SO slowly.”

”This is boring. Hurry up so we can go home.”

It wasn’t wrong. This was wasting time that I could be using to Get More Steps. Maybe it would start to get dark, or the clouds would move in and I would return home instead of reaching my goal. What were all the steps I was missing out on because I had stopped to literally smell the roses?

A brief aside to mention that I had worked in online/mobile games in my early career, witnessing the rise of social games on Facebook with all its attendant extrinsic mechanics for engagement, and the subsequent perversion of those same mechanics into non-entertainment contexts, sold as the secret to engaging and retaining your users on a product that they might not even want to use.

But surely, I thought, knowing about how all that worked would immunize me from its effects, right? How could it have gone so wrong?

I didn’t like what this device was doing to my sense of what was actually “right” for me. I felt an intrinsic desire to stop and examine everything closer, get curious about what each leaf looked like, what colors they were and how they grew from their branches. I heard a bird that I recognized, and I wanted to look around and figure out where it was coming from, and then to witness it sitting on a branch singing for a little bit. I wanted to sit down on a bench that was lit in warm sunlight and just take in the sound of wind rustling the plants around me, hear the crunch underfoot of other visitors walking through the cedar chips lining the redwood grove. And yet my extrinsic motivator was pulling at me to speed up.

“Can we get going now?”

Fitbit, abandoned, June 2023.

A reexamination of purpose

The Fitbit was no longer serving me. At first it was aligned with my goals — getting me out to these spaces and exploring my new neighborhood. Then it augmented my goals, but not in such a noticeable way that I was aware of it. And then when my own motivations for visiting the garden changed, it became an antagonist to those goals. So I stopped using it.

I’m aware that people buy and use Fitbits for any assortment of reasons, and it’s not somehow noble of me to be like, “Oh, I don’t need a Fitbit, I just naturally enjoy walking now.” But the piece that I needed to question for myself, and maybe the piece that opens up questions for you, is whether what I’m tracking is aligned with my actual goals, and whether those little gold stars and streaks are actively harming my ability to get closer to what I actually want.

It is not the only quantified outcome that I have started to question in recent months. I think about how my writing behavior changes when I’m in the middle of NaNoWriMo sprint or a #1000WordsofSummer challenge. I think about how my yoga practice changes when I’m doing Yoga with Adriene’s 30 Day journeys. I thought that bootstrapping my goals to easily quantified extrinsic motivations would lead to the outcomes I wanted. But instead, I met a bunch of those goals yet lost sight of the outcomes entirely. What good, then, does quantifying ourselves really accomplish?

For me, this is the start of unraveling so much metrics-based validation and measurement that has seeped over from my work life into my personal, and it’s only just begun. I’m eager to share more of this in the coming weeks, here.

Do I miss the little animation that plays when I reach my step goal? Do I miss opening up the Fitbit app and feeling good about the streak of 7, 14, 21 days of met goals?

Yes. But it’s not worth missing everything else.