What I stopped measuring

For about three years I tracked things. Not obsessively — I want to be clear that this was never a spreadsheet-at-4am situation — but steadily, and across more of my life than I'd have admitted to at the time. Words written. Hours worked. Books finished. Kilometres. A sleep score from a device that had no business assigning one.

I've stopped nearly all of it, and I've been trying to work out what I actually learned, because "tracking is bad" is not it.

What measuring is good at

It is very good at one specific thing: telling you that your impression of yourself is wrong.

Every single time I started measuring something, the first two weeks were useful, and the reason was always the same. I thought I read more than I did. I thought I wrote more evenly than I did. I thought the bad weeks were rare and they were not rare. A number is an excellent argument against a story you've been telling yourself, and most of us are telling ourselves several.

What it is bad at

Everything after those two weeks.

Once the correction has landed, the number stops informing and starts steering. This is the part I underestimated. I did not consciously decide to write shorter, easier sentences to keep a daily word count up — but the count went up and the writing got worse, and it took an embarrassingly long time to connect those two facts.

• The metric replaced the thing it was standing in for.
• Days the metric couldn't see stopped feeling like they counted.
• I got better at the measurement and no better at the work.

The two-week rule

So here's the only rule I've kept. When I suspect my sense of something is off, I measure it for two weeks. Then I stop, whatever the numbers are doing, and keep whatever the correction was.

It sounds arbitrary. It isn't, quite: two weeks is long enough to break an illusion and short enough that nothing has time to reorganise itself around the number.

What I still count

Two things. Money, because it's genuinely a number and pretending otherwise is just expensive. And loaves of bread, because the count has no bearing on how I bake and I like knowing it.

Everything worth doing eventually stops being measurable, and the measuring is what tells you when you've arrived.

Everything else I've let go, and the honest report is that I have no idea whether I read more or less than I did three years ago. That used to bother me. It doesn't now.