Willpower boost with self-tracking awareness?

I remember when I first read about this Nicholas Felton character thinking he lost a couple of screws up top or something. Essentially each year, he distills his life down to a condensed annual report with various statistics about his year. Shear lunacy, I thought. More recently though, I’ve begun to experience the shear boost of willpower from knowledge of personal tracking. Whereas before I was only accountable to myself and my advisor (graduate school and all), I now feel like I hold accountability to anyone that follows any of my statistics.

Having not paid much attention to my personal tracking mechanisms till late, I didn’t realize the shear number of data that I already have on my life. More recently, I’ve started tracking (in detail) my exercise and sleep… all to my substantial benefit. In a sense, my Last.fm account was my first major foray into self-tracking, but my discover of Gmail year in review allowed even my ancient gmail account to become a massive source of personal information. My other older tracking account of course is my Good reads account with which I track all books that I read in a year.

Lately though, my obsession has been ratcheted up a notch with my discovery of endomondo and an android sleep tracker app. The past week or so, I've been tracking every single one of my workout with endomondo. This has proved to be of massive benefit for me personally. Before, my jogs were often short or my pace would slow down considerably as I ran. With this app, I feel constantly encouraged to push myself further and further. I should soon be breaking eight minute miles if I keep up my pace improvement! The sleep tracker on the other hand really aids with my knowledge of exactly how much sleep I’m getting. When I wake up in the morning, the last thing on my mind usually is to figure out how many hours I slept. To my surprise, I’m sleeping considerably less than I thought, so I’ve made it a prerogative to sleep at least seven hours a night. Willpower enhancement? Seems like I found something that works for me!