The first instinct with any dashboard is to fill it. Every number that can be captured gets captured, and within a month you are maintaining a small observatory that tells you nothing, because nothing in it was chosen.

A metric earns its place by one test: if it moved, would you do something differently? If not, it is decoration.

Worth it: where the money goes, by category, monthly

Almost everyone overestimates the categories they feel guilty about and underestimates the ones that are simply large and unremarkable. Subscriptions, deliveries, and the children are the usual surprises. One month of honest categorisation changes behaviour more than a year of resolutions, because it replaces a feeling with a number.

The version that actually helps is not the total. It is the total against how much of the month has passed, and this month against last month per category. Those two comparisons are where the decisions are.

Worth it: sleep, and only sleep, to begin with

Of everything a watch measures, sleep is the one that explains the most and costs nothing to collect. Stress scores and recovery numbers are derived and noisy; step counts are mostly a proxy for whether you left the house. Sleep duration and consistency, laid against your weeks, will explain a surprising share of the days that felt bad.

Add the rest later, if ever. Most people never need to.

Worth it: what you decided, and why

This is the least popular and most valuable thing on the list. Write down the decisions that took more than a day to make: what you chose, what the alternatives were, why you chose it, and what would make you reconsider.

An unrecorded decision comes back. It returns every few weeks, wearing the same clothes, and each time you pay the full cost of making it again.

Six months later the record is also the only honest way to tell whether your judgement is any good — memory quietly edits the reasoning to match the outcome.

Worth it: when you last spoke to the people who matter

Not a contact list. A date, and one line about what was going on with them. Relationships do not end from neglect in a dramatic way; they thin out because nobody has a record and six months feels like six weeks.

Worth it: one line a day about how it actually was

Not a diary in the literary sense. One line, written the way you would text a friend. Its value is entirely retrospective: a year later it is the only source that says what a period was actually like, as opposed to what you now remember it being like.

Not worth it, for most people

  • Time tracking by the minute — high cost, and the answer is almost always “meetings and switching”
  • Habit streaks — they measure the streak, not the habit, and breaking one tends to end the practice
  • Mood scored out of ten — too coarse to act on; a sentence carries more
  • Step counts as a health metric — a proxy for going outside, which you already know
  • Any number you cannot influence this week

The point of a life dashboard is not completeness. It is having, on the day a decision comes up, the two or three numbers that make the decision obvious.