“Do for the love of doing, for the love of others. That’s unmeasurable, and profoundly life changing.”

I have had several conversations over the past week about alternatives to living without goals. Some people just can’t live with the pressure of a looming deadline for a goal. It’s no secret that I love Douglas Adams. Let me quote him: I love deadlines. I love the swooshing sound they make as the pass by. Related to setting goals, and just as big of a potential source of stress, is measuring progress.

Image by kalilo

Zenhabits.net posted recently on an alternative to measuring by pointing out, how do we really measure the important things in life– things like how much we love our partner, family, or friends? Why then do we feel the need to measure other things such as productivity, calories consumed or burned, miles ran, etc.? Yes, in some instances measuring is necessary, but probably not as necessary as we make it.

There are some inherent problems with measurement as it’s frequently used. Babauta writes:

• It takes time to measure and track — that’s valuable time you could have spent doing or living.
• It creates a mindset that we must always improve, always measure, always manage things, always strive for better, better, better. What about learning to be happy with yourself? What about focusing on joy and compassion and people you love? When does the improving stop? Are we ever satisfied? And is that the point of living — to improve endlessly, to always make things better, and never be happy with where we are?
• It’s stressful to measure and track a lot of things, and it’s disappointing if those numbers don’t go up, or don’t go up as much as we’d hoped.
• We have to choose what to measure, and how do we know we’re choosing the right thing? Why is that thing the only thing that matters? It’s a narrowing way of looking at life.
• It doesn’t improve happiness. It doesn’t make us content. It doesn’t keep us in the moment.

For the full read, click the link below.

Untrack via zenhabits.net