Unsplash, 2025
I woke up yesterday with low, depressed energy. It was Sunday, and I hadn’t written anything to post on Monday. Maybe Saturday’s wine stole Sunday’s energy. Two glasses can send me to sluggish city. I’m trying to stick to my commitment to share something once a week on Substack. But I didn’t have a draft for this week. According to my “Writer Tracker” Google Sheet, I wrote five times this week. I just hadn’t written anything I wanted to share.
About a month ago, I started tracking my freewrites, and it’s been the single most motivating thing I’ve done. If you haven’t tried tracking your creative time yet, I highly recommend it. My system is simple: I jot down the date, start and end time, and any notes, like the theme or if I hit blocks. If a full essay comes out of it, I log that too.
From Freewrites to Tracking Everything
I’ve become a chronic tracker. I also track other things:
* Content I post on social (it’s so easy to burn out here, I need to see progress)
* My menstrual cycle (new, but I’m curious how it affects motivation and mood)
* Calories and exercise (helpful, but I fall off and on)
* Auditions (I lost track this year because they felt so few and far between)
Lately, I’ve been thinking I should start tracking how much I dance each week and what I’m learning. In our first class, my dance instructor said to always ‘be in conversation’ with yourself about the process. How does this move feel in my body? Why am I struggling with this? Or why is it easy? How could I approach it differently now?
Clocking this information and being curious about it is a form of tracking. And this kind of tracking is where we see growth.
I’ll share a Harvard study I love to tell my barre and Pilates students. Researchers studied hotel maids doing their daily work, making beds, vacuuming, scrubbing bathrooms. One group was told it was just work, the other was told to think of it as exercise. After four weeks, the “exercise” group (the ones who ‘merely’ imagined they were working out!) showed measurable improvements in fitness: lower weight, blood pressure, and BMI. If you’re curious, you can read the study in detail here.
It just goes to show you that conscious connection between the mind and what we’re doing in our lives is crucial to faster growth.
Things I don’t track: my golf handicap. After four years, I’m still very much a beginner (lol). For now, I just want to enjoy the game, practice my swing, and think more strategically about the course. There will be a time to keep score, but not yet. And guess what? My fun meter for golf is off the charts. Tracking can wait…
So, why bother tracking at all?
Because tracking shows me I’m making progress, even when I don’t feel it. On low-energy days like today, when my brain insists I haven’t accomplished much, looking at my tracker gives me a small but real hit of dopamine. It also helps me counteract perfectionism. I’m not tracking for quality or even quantity—just that I showed up. Five minutes is enough. As long as I got my hands moving, it counts.
Why Tracking Matters
I read a book called The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan, which argues that unless we track what we’re doing, we’re always measuring “the gap”—the distance between where we are and where we want to go. How much money we don’t have. How far away the dream still feels. We rarely measure “the gain” — the ground we’ve already covered.
Visibility of our gains is essential, but in creative fields, it’s not always obvious. That’s why building your own tracking system is key.
And here’s the fun part: when I look at my tracker, I can see that the one to two days before I publish an essay is when the most writing happens. Which proves something: those wandering freewrites really do lead to published essays.
(You can see I’m not perfectly consistent, but even jotting a few things down really helps. The green highlights where a Substack essay was written).
It’s a lot like running. Most runners will tell you the hardest part isn’t the run itself. It’s lacing up your shoes and stepping outside. Once you do that, momentum takes over. Tracking my writing works the same way. Even if I only “lace up” for five minutes, it often turns into something more. And even when it doesn’t, I can look back and see that I showed up.
And today I need that reminder.
The Weight of Politics and Grief
I usually like to bring humor into these newsletters, but right now my sense of humor is face-down on the couch. (That last sentence was my best attempt.) Part of it is the heaviness of politics right now. i.e. What is happening with free speech? I want to jump on a social media soapbox and let it rip, but I know that cycle rarely helps me feel lighter. (I wrote about this last week in “Outrage is Contagious. Here’s How to Protect Yourself.”)
On weeks like this, having something measurable to look at helps me not drown in that heaviness.
And on the other hand, part of my low energy feels like grief bubbling under the surface. The kind that’s always there and you can never outrun. I keep wanting to turn those feelings into something meaningful, to make loss somehow worth it. But the truth is, no accomplishment will erase trauma. Some days, that reality makes me feel very sad, and I don’t quite know how to sit with that.
But on other days, I look at what I’ve tracked and see: despite how I felt, I’ve kept moving. Tracking shows me that grief and growth can coexist. That I can feel motionless and still be moving. My instinct is to go silent and to process internally. There’s almost an unspoken rule of grief: don’t speak, just carry it quietly. I’ve chosen to share some of it.
Here's part of a poem I wrote about grief a couple months ago (If you’d like to read the full essay “I’m Afraid to Share This.”) :
“The hardest thingis holding two worlds:breath in the lungs,loss in the bones.”
Here I am, writing anyway. Tracking doesn’t erase grief, but it gives me something concrete to hold onto on the days when sadness feels shapeless.
So I’ll leave you with this: track it.
I wrote today. It might not be my best, but it exists. And that counts. Maybe next week will be more interesting. For now, thank you for being here.
And now I’ll turn this to you…
Question for the comments: Do you track anything in your life, creative, personal, or otherwise? And what do you choose not to track?
