Free Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin

library and returned them after I’d finished them. I bought books and put them on the shelf, read. I took notes on my reading. Yet I had no idea when I found time to read. When did I read?
    My friend Laura Vanderkam , a time-management expert, emphasizes the power of tracking time use, so I decided to try that. I made a daily time log—a simple grid with the days of the week mapped against the hours of the day in thirty-minute increments. The log could be used to track any activity, but I planned to record my reading time.
    Or maybe not. After a few days, I admitted defeat. Many people find the time log to be an invaluable tool, but I just could not use it. The paper was never in the right place, or I kept forgetting to enter my reading time.
    I disliked the idea of getting more dependent on my phone—after all, I still rely on my ancient Filofax—but I was already using my phone to monitor, so I decided to use it to monitor my reading, too. After some cursory research into time-tracking apps (Secret of Adulthood: Most decisions don’t require extensive research), I downloaded the TimeJot app. I couldn’t get myself to use it. Next, HoursTracker. No luck. I just couldn’t get in the habit of recording my reading time, and the more I tried, the more annoyed I got. This attempted habit wasn’t doing any good, so I junked it.
    However, even this failed attempt to monitor made me more aware of my desire to read. So, although I can’t point to a time log to prove that I’m reading more, I’m pretty sure that I am.
    I considered monitoring spending, as well. People aren’t very good at tracking their expenditures; in one study, when thirty people were asked to estimate the amount on their credit card bill, every person underestimated that number, by an average of almost 30 percent. For many people, credit cards are themselves an obstacle to accurate monitoring of spending, because while handing over a wad of cash makes spending seem vividly real, using a charge card makes parting with money easier. The same principle of disguised expenditure explains why casinos require that gamblers play with chips, not bills, and why it’s easy to overspend in a foreign country, where money looks as if it came from a board game.
    For some people, however, plastic works better than cash. A reader noted, “When I get cash, it always seems to disappear quickly, and I have little idea how it was spent. I buy almost everything with one credit card. I log in to my account online regularly, and I can see what I’ve bought and how much I’ve spent.”
    In the end, however, I decided not to monitor my spending. Monitoring is a powerful tool, and it would probably give me valuable insights into how Jamie and I spend money. But my spending was well under control—in fact, as an underbuyer, I often need to prod myself to buy . (For instance, my family is perpetually short of mittens and gloves.) Since monitoring takes time and energy, I decided that monitoring expenditures would only sap the energy I needed for monitoring the aspects of my life that I truly want to track.
    As I talked to people about how they monitor themselves, the potentially dangerous concept of moderation kept cropping up. Framing a level of activity or consumption as moderate can be misleading, because while the word “moderation” implies reasonableness and restraint, it’s actually a relative term. Moderate in comparison to what? Two hundred years ago, Americans ate less than a fifth of the sugar that we eat today. So a “moderate” amount of sugar by today’s standards could be considered excessive by historical standards. Monitoring requires us to make an actual reckoning, which defeats the comfortable fuzziness of moderation.
    As I’d hoped, Monitoring was having a good effect on my habits. Even before applying more active habits strategies, I’d noticed myself making small