Does tracking your personal growth with an AI app actually work?

Why Self-Tracking Apps Can Backfire, Per AI Research

Self-tracking apps like Exist.io ($6.99/month) and Rize.io ($9.99-$39.99/month) can only score you on axes they already know to measure. Kenneth Stanley's AI research in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned found novelty-seeking algorithms solved a maze 39 times out of 40 versus 3 times out of 40 for objective-based search, evidence that chasing a metric directly can block the stepping stones that lead to real growth.

Every founder I coach eventually asks some version of the same question: how do I know if I'm actually growing, or just busy? A few have started answering it with apps, like Exist.io at $6.99 a month (or $62.90 billed annually) which correlates mood, sleep, and work data to surface patterns, or Rize.io at $9.99 to $39.99 a month depending on tier, which auto-tracks where your hours go and scores your focus. I've tried both. They're well-built. And I think they answer the wrong question for anyone chasing something genuinely ambitious.

The research that changed my mind on this is Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman's Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, which grew out of AI research, not self-help. Stanley built an algorithm called novelty search that has no objective at all; it just rewards behavior that's different from what's been tried before, and ran it against a standard objective-based search algorithm in a maze-navigation task. Novelty search solved the maze 39 times out of 40. The algorithm explicitly told to minimize distance to the goal solved it 3 times out of 40. Optimizing directly for the metric made the metric harder to hit.

That's the trap in self-quantification tools, even good ones. The moment you're optimizing a focus score or a streak, you've made the metric the objective, and Stanley's research says ambitious objectives are deceptive: the stepping stones that actually lead somewhere new rarely resemble progress on the metric you're tracking. His favorite illustration is Picbreeder, a site where users bred digital images through evolution; the most striking images, cars, skulls, butterflies, were never found by anyone trying to breed them. They only showed up when someone followed what looked interesting, with no destination in mind.

I'm not telling clients to delete Rize or Exist; the raw data is genuinely useful for spotting burnout early, and I still glance at my own Exist correlations weekly. But I stopped using either as the measure of whether I'm growing, because a dashboard can only score you on axes it already knows to measure. It cannot tell you that the two hours you spent reading about a topic with no obvious application to your business were the most important two hours of your month, and in my experience those are usually exactly the two hours that turn out to matter most eighteen months later.

What I use instead, once a week, takes about ten minutes and produces something no app I've found tracks.

First, I write down one thing from the past week that was genuinely interesting to me, not productive, not on the roadmap, just interesting, even if I can't yet say why.

Second, I note what it opened up. Did it lead to a conversation, a question, a half-formed idea I wouldn't have had otherwise? Stanley's term for this is a stepping stone: you're not judging the thing itself, you're judging what it made possible.

Third, I ask what I'd have missed if I'd only done the things that scored well on a dashboard that week. This is usually the most uncomfortable question, and it's usually where the actual answer lives.

None of this replaces hard operating discipline; I still track revenue, still hit deadlines, still use structured metrics where the goal is genuinely simple and near, which is Stanley's own caveat: objectives work fine for finding the fridge, they fail for anything ambitious. But "am I growing" is an ambitious, distant target, and Stanley's maze data suggests the more directly you try to measure your way toward it, the more likely you are to miss the stepping stone that would have actually gotten you there.

Sources: Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (2015); Exist.io pricing, exist.io (2026); Rize.io pricing, rize.io/pricing (2026).