Unlike the antilibrary there’s no value in notes taken and never referred to again.

We’re all familiar with the concept of the antilibrary, right? Here’s a refresher:

The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

As true as this holds for books, it’s not a concept to be universally applied. The antipantry is a fancy compost bin. The antitracker, that spreadsheet or Notion page or fancy app where you measure data with no ability to extract value from the points, adds no significant improvement to your life.

Here’s some posts from around the web on the point and pointlessness of tracking everything.

Ben Grosser – Twitter Demetricator “Are your like and retweet metrics changing how you feel about reactions to your latest tweet, or your plans for what to write next? And finally, who benefits from a system that constantly encourages all of us to evaluate and compare based on what the metrics say?” (I don’t think this works on X anymore. Pity.)

Dylan Hughes – Why I Stopped Tracking Everything “How often do you hear someone say they are on a ‘digital detox’? While the numbers aren’t the only reason for that, they play a part.”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff – The fallacy of “what gets measured gets managed” “Somehow, a long game of telephone resulted in a truncated version of the idea, where the most important part about being careful with measurement was forgotten.”

Leo Babauta – Untrack “Can’t we run for the joy of it? Aren’t we motivated to do it because we love ourselves? And who cares if we run more miles or not?”

Finally, two radically different takes on tracking your reading from Jamie Rubin (who does indeed track articles and blog posts read) and Alan Jacobs: “one reason why I don’t make these year-end lists: they tell a misleading story.”.