To be more productive, you first have to understand the conditions and elements that contribute to your best days—and your worst, through self-tracking with technology known as The Quantified Self movement. This involves gathering data on specific goals, such as eating 8 servings of vegetables every day or doing 30 minutes of cardio daily, using tools like smart watches, Fitbit, or software like RescueTime. Once you have a snapshot of your activities and metrics across weeks and months, you're ready to dive into the data and start looking for trends. To make the most of this data, you need to interact with it in meaningful ways, such as charting the data by hand, looking for outliers, identifying variables, and taking notes. The key is to slow down and make the data harder to absorb, forcing yourself to use it in a way that's not simple at first. This will help you transform what life throws at you, rather than just taking it as it comes, and ultimately lead to behavioral changes. By experimenting with your data, you'll engage more fully with your daily experience, pay attention to the little details that have a big impact on your life, and find new ways to improve your productivity.