Comment by reverendsteveii

I really do think that there's something reifying about the physical act of writing it down. I think that because in one of my many stutterstepping starts into the world of weightlifting I tried keeping a log on my phone and it did all the same things that keeping a log on the wall does (arguably more, the whiteboard doesn't track historical data and can't automatically generate charts for me) but it just felt like shouting numbers into the void every day. There was no sense of job-well-done satisfaction when I hit a personal best, there was no little ceremony of removing a number from the board to make room for a new, higher number. There was just a bunch of individual workouts and I either did them or I didn't and no one cared either way, including me.