TL;DR
Beware the trap of optimising for the wrong metrics! Metrics are meant to help us achieve goals and although there are common metrics for common goals, some situations demand rethinking the combination of metrics that we use and creating new ones. We must seek to ensure that our metrics are a true reflection of a marriage between our processes, goals, and how the former feeds into the latter before we start optimising.
Almost every productivity guru - at least every modern age one - starts by telling us to cut back on our screen time. But should we really be doing that?
Months ago, I was taken over by a productivity frenzy. I wanted to ensure that I was getting the most out of every minute. So I made screen time the sacrificial lamb; I deleted all but the essential social media apps, set time limits, and even installed other apps that made me wait longer each time I opened the essential social media apps.
And then I started thinking about what I just did.
In the spectrum of simple to power users of X, I am somewhere in the middle. I have made my own lists, subscribed to other users’ lists that I think are worthwhile, have no idea that it can be a reels app, and have created an amazing feed by being very intentional about how I use the platform.
I previously boasted to my friends in Musk’s lingo that X was my townsquare. To me, if our grandparent’s habit of glancing through daily editions of the paper was not altogether an unproductive activity, how could my daily dose of X-scrolling be an unproductive activity? I often said that with a pinch of salt because I understood that what appeared on one’s feed was a key consideration, and I realised how lucky I was to have curated an educational feed as opposed to an attention-grabbing one.
When I panicked into super-productivity mode, however, I forgot all of that. It didn’t take me long to realise a collapse in the levels of exposure I previously got to new ideas, and the all-rounded learning that was central to my T-shaped aspiration.
I recently re-read Kaplan’s “The Balanced Scorecard” alongside his Harvard Business School case on the City of Charlotte. One thing that stood out to me was the idea that successful businesses know how to identify (sometimes that involves designing from a scratch) the metrics that are true indicators of their performance and goal-alignment. It is not optimization that is the rate determining step, it is the definition of metrics. One could say that the rate determining step to superior performance is thinking hard about the what and why questions. If we get those right, the how questions are way more likely to get us to our goals.
In my situation, I was using screen time as a proxy for measuring wasted time. I completely forgot that at least in my case, time spent on X was not wasted time (even though it accounted for a huge portion of my screen time) and was rather key to the T-shaped learning that is very important to me. I reinstalled X, and since then I have made it a point to block and mute and to better optimise my feed for my goals. That way, I am maximising for a metric that is important to me; time spent learning.
How are you cutting back on your screen time? That is not the important question. Why are you cutting back on your screen time? And what about screen time, and the things in your life that contribute towards that, is related to your goals?
Perhaps we should always remember that rushing to optimization without understanding the metric is in no way a reasonable approach to pursue our goals. It may help for us to ask ourselves; what we want to achieve, what we need to do as a result of what we want, what metrics marry our processes to our goals, and lastly if we need to develop new metrics. We must, however, be careful with inventing new things; we can fall into the trap of inventing metrics that are inferior to existing ones, or bake wrong assumptions into the design of our metrics.
I chose to base this on screen time because I imagine it is something that many people take for granted. I hope that in realising how “not-for-granted” it actually is, you will commit to thinking more critically about the metrics around which you chose to base your decisions, and avoid the trespass of optimising for the wrong metrics.