What is benchmarking personal performance?

Benchmarking personal performance is a concept in personal epistemology: Compare agents against each other and against baselines to identify relative performance.

Example: You run two morning routines for three weeks each. Routine A (exercise first, then deep work) produces an average focus score of 7.2 and completes 4.1 high-priority tasks by noon. Routine B (deep work first, then exercise) scores 6.4 focus and 3.6 tasks. Without the comparison, both routines felt 'fine.' The data shows Routine A outperforms by 12% on focus and 14% on throughput. That gap was invisible until you placed the two side by side.

This concept is part of Phase 28 (Agent Monitoring) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent monitoring.