Metrics
How much do you weigh? How much do you bench? What's your test coverage? How much was your bonus this year? These are popular metrics. But are they important questions?
Are you fit to live your life? Are you making progress or inviting injury? Are you moving too fast? Is your design useful? Is your software maintainable? Are you happy at work? These are important questions, but they are harder to measure. So we give up. And we obsess over metrics we don't understand to answer questions that don't matter. Or we refuse to measure at all, because answering irrelevant questions is beneath us.
And then we end up in a place we don't like with too much time wasted and not enough energy to get out.
I say: start small. Pick something. Measure something. Do it every day. Do it for a while. Enough to gather personal statistics. Enough to build a habit of non-competitive measuring.
And then invent a better metric. And start measuring something else that matters to YOU.
Are you fit to live your life? Are you making progress or inviting injury? Are you moving too fast? Is your design useful? Is your software maintainable? Are you happy at work? These are important questions, but they are harder to measure. So we give up. And we obsess over metrics we don't understand to answer questions that don't matter. Or we refuse to measure at all, because answering irrelevant questions is beneath us.
And then we end up in a place we don't like with too much time wasted and not enough energy to get out.
I say: start small. Pick something. Measure something. Do it every day. Do it for a while. Enough to gather personal statistics. Enough to build a habit of non-competitive measuring.
And then invent a better metric. And start measuring something else that matters to YOU.