Things we optimised but shouldn't have.

An incomplete inventory of metrics that quietly outgrew their meaning, and a sketch of what we should have been measuring instead.

I · Metrics that broke

1. Steps. We measured them. The body, in response, started cheating. We added stairs we did not need and skipped sleep we did. The number went up. The health did not.
2. Productivity. We optimised the calendar and lost the life. Most people now do their highest-leverage thinking in the shower because the calendar has consumed every other place it could have happened.
3. Inbox zero. We treated email as the unit of work. Email is the unit of other people's work, intruding on yours. Inbox zero is the silent agreement to be everyone else's assistant.
4. Followers. The metric of presence. Not the metric of relationship, of contribution, of meaning. A million followers and three friends is a famous loneliness. A small list and four good friends is the actual prize.
5. Engagement. We taught content to be rage-bait because rage engages. The platforms got bigger. The conversation got dumber. The metric was selecting for the wrong thing the whole time.
6. Speed of reply. We mistook responsiveness for respect. The person who responds in ten minutes feels available. The person who responds in three days has often been thinking. Long love and long collaboration prefer the second.
7. Output. Books finished. Posts shipped. Decks delivered. The measurements went up. The quality, on average, did not. There is a reason we still read the slow ones from a hundred years ago.
8. Career velocity. We celebrated the rocket. The rocket runs out of fuel. The slow lane, less photographed, produces most of the people who actually like their fifties.

Optimisation is a useful servant. It is a terrible master.

II · What we should have measured

A short list of things that mostly cannot be measured well, and that you should organise the next decade around regardless.

1. The quality of your closest friendships. Not the count. The depth.
2. The depth of one essay you will write this year. Not the number you publish.
3. The number of hard conversations you returned to a day late. Not the number of confrontations you won.
4. The number of strangers you treated like a person at a counter. Not the number of strangers you sold to.
5. The hours you slept. The hours you walked without your phone. The number of times this year you laughed in a kitchen.

I will keep arguing this here. Slowly.

Slowly,
Avinaash