Activity trackers should be more like Santa Claus. Here's why.

It’s too much trouble to push a button.

We don’t want to have to push a button to have a tracker go into sleep monitoring mode and we really don’t want to have to remember—upon waking all blurry-eyed and foggy-brained—to push a button to have a tracker go from sleep mode to movement mode (or any other mode). This issue came up repeatedly at a recent DC Quantified Self Meetup.

We don’t want to have to think about pushing buttons, syncing, connecting, or anything else. We want our activity tracking devices to automatically know when we’re sleeping and when we’re awake.

We want our tracking to be seamless and invisible.

In essence, we want our activity trackers to be just like Santa Claus—who’s also really, really good at the incentivizing part.