It’s a common feature on smartphones and smartwatches. They provide tools that measure a variety of activities. May it be walking, sleeping, on-screen activity, or other measurable activities we’ll perform with our bodies.

Such tools have every chance to be useful. The information they provide can serve us in many ways. However, most of their potential is lost when the measurement serves to judge what we’ve done and categorize it as good or bad.

When using measurement to judge, we forget that the measurement isn’t the experience. It is a quantitative description of the experience. One that doesn’t say anything about the qualitative experience. And one that doesn’t say anything about future experiences.

Nothing replaces our ability to sense, for example, if we slept well and enough. What the measurement can provide us with is information about our sleep patterns. Including those we may not be conscious of. It is up to us to analyze the information and find out how it aligns with our experience. The result may be more awareness and an enhanced sense of our qualitative experience.

The measurements don’t tell us what we should have done. They can, however, make us aware of some of our habits and how compatible they are with our physical needs. If we constantly feel tired and learn from the measurements that we only sleep 5 hours per night, we may have to change when we go to bed and how long we give ourselves to sleep. It might not be the answer to our lack of sleep, but it is a useful experiment.

Such measurement is information that provides us with support in achieving an objective we’ve defined. They don’t tell us what our experience was. They can’t tell us if what we did was good or bad. They can only tell us if the measured result corresponds to something we wanted to achieve. We may learn from it whether what we wanted to achieve is useful to us or not.