Hobbies and the Trap of Optimising Them
Applying tracking to things done for their own sake reliably damages them, and the mechanism is well enough understood to be worth avoiding deliberately.
The methods in this collection work on work. Applied to something done because you enjoy it, they frequently remove the reason you were doing it. For paid team work, this client-work note offers a way to document agreed hours and projects, while “Hobbies and the Trap of Optimising Them” is a reminder that personal time, care, rest and learning need boundaries that an employer’s record should not cross.
What happens
An activity with no external measure acquires one.
Attention shifts from the doing to the number: pages read rather than reading, kilometres rather than running, streak length rather than practice.
The number becomes the goal, and days when the number would be low stop happening at all.
And the activity becomes something to be efficient at, which for most hobbies is the opposite of the point.
Why this is predictable
Measurement changes behaviour — the same effect the foundations note describes, applied where the behaviour did not need changing.
Adding an external reward or score to something done for its own sake is well documented as reducing the internal motivation for it.
Which makes hobbies the clearest case in this collection where the method should not be applied.
Where measuring a hobby is reasonable
Deliberate skill acquisition, where you are trying to get better at something specific and the feedback is genuinely useful.
Training for an event with a date.
Safety-relevant limits: hours at altitude, dives, time in cold water.
And noticing that something you care about has not happened for two months, which is a coarse check rather than a measurement.
The streak problem
Streaks are the most effective and most damaging form.
They work: people do things to preserve them.
And they convert a good day into an obligation, make a missed day a failure, and reliably produce the abandonment of the whole activity when the streak breaks.
If you use one, decide in advance what happens when it breaks, which removes most of the harm.
The coarse alternative
A monthly tick: did this happen at all.
Twelve marks a year, no numbers, no comparison.
Which catches the thing worth catching — an activity quietly disappearing — without introducing a score.
For most people this is the only tracking a hobby should get.
Where it has already gone wrong
The signs: reluctance before starting, relief at finishing, checking the total during, and a sense of having fallen behind at something nobody set.
The remedy is to stop measuring, entirely, for a couple of months.
The enjoyment usually returns, and the fact that this works is itself evidence about what the measuring was doing.
The boundary this points at
Tracking works on things you are trying to produce.
On things you are trying to experience, it substitutes a proxy for the thing.
Knowing which category an activity is in, before applying any method here, prevents most of the damage in this section — and its own note covers when tracking becomes the problem generally.
What to check
Are you measuring anything you do purely because you like it?
Has any of it become an obligation?
Do you check a number during the activity?
And is there something you care about that has quietly not happened for months — which is the one thing worth a coarse check?
Worth keeping in mind
The signs it has gone wrong: reluctance before starting, relief at finishing, checking the total during. Stop measuring entirely for two months; the enjoyment usually returns, which is itself evidence about what the measuring was doing.
The short version
Knowing whether an activity is something you produce or something you experience, before applying any method here, prevents most of the damage in this section.
In short
Adding an external score to something done for its own sake is well documented as reducing the internal motivation for it.
Hobbies are the clearest case in this collection where the method should simply not be applied.
The point
A monthly tick that it happened at all.
Twelve marks a year, no numbers, no comparison — enough to catch something quietly disappearing. For a complementary perspective on work, measurement or planning, consult Harvard Business Review.