Hey everyone!

Recently, I embarked on a free trial of WHOOP. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a fitness wearable that tracks your heart rate, sleep and “strain” (a metric of how hard your body has been working).

Overall, it’s supposed to help you become healthier by encouraging good sleeping habits and motivating you to hit personalised exercise targets.

I’ve been using it for approximately two weeks, and I’ve found it to be a really enjoyable experience.

That being said, I’m deciding to cancel my free trial. Here’s why 👇

Data has no use without a purpose.

What I’ve realised from my two weeks using WHOOP is that health data is useful, but also completely useless at the same time.

My WHOOP has been giving me interesting insights into my resting heart rate, heart rate variability and the amount that I have been sleeping, but the question I’m left with at the end is… What do I do with this?

Even with medical training, my resting heart rate values tell me next to nothing. WHOOP turns this data into a "recovery score" which tells me how well rested I am each day. For me, this is one of the best features of the device, but I find that I hardly translate that information into change.

The app also tells you your recommended bedtime and how much sleep debt you have. I find this to be the most useful feature, and waking up to a green recovery score is a great feeling.

The WHOOP does a great job of trying to translate data into meaningful insight, but I don’t need my WHOOP to tell me that I’ve slept poorly after a night ending at 3am.

This led me to consider a question.

What is useful data?

In medicine, there is a saying that you shouldn’t order a test if you don’t know how you’ll follow it up.

The key here is having a goal. Setting clear goals gives data purpose. With goals, we can use our data to guide us towards the right path, giving us objective insight that we can pair with our subjective experience.

This is applicable in the reverse. Setting a goal creates the opportunity for us to collect relevant and useful information.

Last week, I talked about my daily 30 minute work habit, which I had set as a goal for the medium term. Since this was my goal, I set this as a daily habit in my habit tracking app, which tells me exactly whether I am failing or achieving my goal.

This information is empowering. I can see that I’m keeping up my streak, even if I’m writing a newsletter at 11:20pm.

However, it’s important to keep data collection simple and targeted. Unnecessary data collection can serve as a form of productive procrastination from working on the task at hand. I see a lot of people collecting data that they can't do much with, distracting them from getting the job done.

In the case of my WHOOP, I feel that the data will prove an (expensive) distraction. I can certainly imagine myself using it in the future, but I feel that the price vs benefit equation is not exactly fulfilled at this point (it costs ~$32 per month as an ongoing subscription).

I’m considering getting a different fitness wearable, like an Apple Watch instead. It has a bit more functionality and does not run a subscription model.

In the meantime, I hope you can think about your goals and the data you’re collecting. Is it actually useful?

- Emil

P.S if you want to use WHOOP you could use my referral link and get a month for free lol