Do you live, or do you wait to live?

Or, the subtle scam of effort metrics

This morning, as I panted for breath after yet another set of kettlebell swings, my personal trainer asked me, “Ma’am, how much longer do you need to be in this industry?"

Yes, he calls me Ma’am. Moving on.

I replied, “Why? Do you think the stress isn’t worth it?”

He shrugged. “Only you can say.”

Can I say? I’ve flirted with retirement a lot recently, with several women my age noping out of tech. Even the men, usually a little more invested in the preservation of the status quo, are starting to wonder, “What’s all this in aid of?”

This time last year, according to Google Photos, I was flying above the North Pole.

Shortly after that, I would be on a 3 month sabbatical to travel and write and live the life I wanted to live. A life, incidentally, sponsored and supported by the very tech job that might reduce how many years I get to enjoy it.

At work, recently, I’ve been having a lot of discussions about metrics. People loooooove metrics. They want scores, confidence intervals, KPIs, slices, and rubrics. What I hear, underneath all that, is the unease with ambiguity and the desire to pin down what it will mean to be successful (or at least, how to prevent failure). Sometimes, this desperation for simplicity makes people beg for ONE metric to rule them all. What’s the most important thing? What’s the top priority? Sometimes I bring up Goodhart’s Law:

Goodhart’s Law is expressed simply as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we set one specific goal, people will tend to optimize for that objective regardless of the consequences. This leads to problems when we neglect other equally important aspects of a situation.

But this only means people concede “Well, you definitely need more than ONE metric then. Maybe three, but no more than five.” All of which smacks of the desperation to preserve the worldview where the world can be simplified and metrics will save us from ourselves.

Among writers is a similar need for The Answer — what’s the best way to market your book? What’s the proven method to avoid agent or publisher rejections? When is a book really ready to be published?

A long time ago, I was working on the launch of a product (we’ll just call it Thingie). Thingie was a radical new design, and so we had no data about whether it would succeed or fail. We had some initial user studies, for sure, but what would a few “beta readers” tell us about a product’s likelihood to succeed in the broader world? I suggested experiments, evals. We had an hour-long discussion about pros and cons. Finally, the exec in charge just sighed and said, “In the end, the metrics don’t matter. We’ve got to go with our gut and learn. Ship it.”

At the time, I was SCANDALIZED. Now, I am that exec. I recognize that more information, more data, and more metrics won’t really make decisions any easier. No extra information could have told me whether Her Golden Coast would be successful, and no evals or focus groups will ever prevent the occasional one-star review every book gets.

Simply put, metrics are not a lifeboat. They might be a life vest, but a life vest would be of limited use if you were to end up in the ocean near those ice caps in the photo above. Hypothermia will kill you first.

Often, metrics are our way of hedging our bets: justifying the choices we’ve already made, while establishing a destination — someday, we will achieve the target. Then, we will be happy. Then, we will live. We’ll retire at {{number}}, or when we have ${{number}} saved up. We try to get in {{number}} steps a day of exercise, or run {{number}} miles a week. We’ll create taxonomies of progress: crawl-walk-run, phases 1, 2, and 3. We’ll measure performance, productivity, even establish rating scales for pleasure (have you really enjoyed a book or restaurant if you only gave it 3 stars?) until we condition ourselves to enjoy neither the journey nor the present moment, but only the satisfaction of forward momentum.