New Years Resolutions and the Dangers of “Vanity Metrics”
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love incremental progress
During my zany adventures in the cubicle jungle of software engineering, I came across a book called The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. It was a really fascinating book in many respects, and there’s so much that may need a second, or third, or fifth reading for me to fully understand. But one of the big takeaways I got from the book was that for just about anything in life, and I don’t mean just for startups — to progress in anything in life, you need metrics. Big metrics. Small metrics. Metrics out the wazoo.
But not just any metrics. After reading Lean Startup, the concept of actionable metrics as opposed to vanity metrics really stuck with me. Vanity metrics. So what is that, a quantification of how great your hair looked that day? How much your wardrobe killed at your night on the town? How many minutes Narcissus stood staring at his reflection in the river?
Welll, maybe. Vanity metrics were measures that had a lot to do with morale and perception of positive progress, but possibly little to no actual progress. So for instance, something like the raw number of how many people visit a bakery. Suppose fifty people walk into a bakery, and everyone walks out without buying a thing. If the bakery were focused just on the amount of foot traffic coming into the venue and never noticed no one was buying anything, they would be out of business pretty fast.
A pretty common possible vanity metric people use in everyday life is the number of tasks crossed off a list. Whether that’s a tasklist, a bucket list, a checklist, a Franz Lizst, or any other sort of list. If you make the tasks, buckets (?), or check items small enough, you can accomplish so many things. Many. In number. But maybe not in value. I’ve done this for ages, and often created a false sense of productivity only to find out that I’ve done almost nothing new.
A big focus in The Lean Startup was that vanity metrics should not be used as a primary measure of progress because they can be really misleading. A fine warning.
Well, I’m here to tell you that I didn’t heed that warning very well in my own life. Like not at all. And figuring that out helped me immensely.
Like any good story, this tale begins with a little scamp with lofty dreams. For a very long time, I’ve had this goal of making reasonable goals. Now if that sounds a little recursive, that’s because it is. Every year, I’ve made increasingly realistic new year’s resolutions with an increasingly reasonable chance of actually accomplishing said resolutions. I’ve also gotten to the point where I announce these goals to anyone who will listen — I call it public accountability for my goals. Or maybe I should call it public embarrassment. Because clearly if there’s one thing that’ll motivate me, it’s public failing at something.
I’ve always liked the idea of it, and actually had something of the kind on my personal website for years. It hadn’t worked in the past … probably because people lead their own lives and have better things to do than monitor some prima donna on social media who expects people to pay attention and keep track when he announces these things.
But then, this year I found a set of goals that I thought I could genuinely stay true to, a set of goals that simultaneously catered to my inner selfishness and allowed me to fulfill some of the tasks I intended to complete. Here’s the list of resolutions I made in January this year:
- Become more active on social media
- Reconnect with old friends
- Get involved in music again
- Stop procrastinating
- Have a 100 day GitHub streak
(Heh heh, there’s that public accountability thing again.) Well, you might be able to see right away, most of these objectives were just vague enough for me to be able to eventually justify to myself that I achieved some watered down form of them. And that was to my benefit, at least partially. I so desperately wanted goals I could achieve.
An Illusion of Good Progress
Well, first the elephant in the room. Why even have that first one? Many of my friends came up to me at the time and told me that was a weird goal to have, which I understood from their perspectives, but here’s why I needed it. I made that goal for myself because I used to “jack out,” to borrow a phrase from Stephen Fry. Before making this goal, I hadn’t been on Facebook or any other kind of social media in more than a year. I liked to think it was because I had gotten so disheartened by the banal social posturing and political outrage and bigotry. But truthfully, it was mostly because I’m somewhere on the introvert side of social.
If left to my own devices, I would probably stay in some high-tech cave all hours of the day like some sort of modern technology hermit, slowly but surely stockpiling oodles of social awkwardness and focusing on just music and hacking together cool things. Literally just “left to my own devices.” So I don’t always need social interaction to feel fulfilled. But it also means I don’t often reach out to anyone for help.
This was made painfully clear to me when, upon graduating from college and before finding a job, I ended up unintentionally depressed, unhealthy, and isolated. I spent many whole days tinkering with code or with something that was totally pointless — without break — and I felt tired all the time.
That was a mentality that held over from my college days, where I took three majors, got involved in several boring college organizations all at the grunt level, and commuted to and from school late at night. I didn’t know how to approach college, how to enjoy it while still making the most of it, so everything I did stemmed from the need to always find something “productive” to do, make sure my “breaks” were filled with “work.” Every moment that I spent having fun, I would be thinking, I have to be doing something useful.
And so it was that I became trapped in vanity metrics.
And of course, after college was over and I was a free agent in the sea of possibilities, I needed to find a way to make that illusion continue. I needed vanity metrics. I needed tasks I could cross off a list. So I found random ideas to devote my life to. Random freelance contract-type ideas, but for myself. Often that just meant “exploring such and such technology or idea”, or “designing such and such product,” or whatever. With no deadlines or even clear ideas, and scope creep — out the wazoo. And for a while, I felt productive because I had a laptop in front of me. Or a piece of blinking hardware. Or a checklist. And armed with this delusion, I quietly tore my life and health apart.
Here’s something that used to happen to me a lot when I got focused on one of these things. I would get so driven to finish that one thing that I wouldn’t take breaks, and I wouldn’t notice this growing emptiness inside. I forgot to eat, I forgot to drink anything. Stopped exercising at all. Became a raging insomniac. But mentally I was still justifying all of this, I believed that I was making “progress” on my “projects,” and that it was worth all these problems.
When friends invited me to do things with them, I came begrudgingly or turned them down. And I didn’t reach out for help, or to anyone for anything at all. I lost fifteen pounds during that month and a half or so. And when you’re my size, that’s not something you can afford to lose.
It all came to a head when I had to drop my mother off in Boston for a dance rehearsal. My mother, being a flutist, was part of the musical ensemble, and I, being not a flutist, was the chauffeur. So we embarked on a four hour car ride, and for the first time in more than a month, I was unable to be “productive” and was forced to examine my life and my own thoughts in solitude.
Long story short, at some point along the highway, I had a bit of a mental breakdown without any warning at all, and what ensued was a pretty embarrassing exchange at the end of which I, half-serious, half asking for help I suppose, told her in tears that I kind of wanted to just turn the car sideways into the highway divider and end it all, at 80 miles an hour.
To this day, I have no idea where that came from, why I said what I said, and what the heck happened that day to make me feel that way, but I remember my mom’s face. And she was completely and utterly freaked out. Not the kind of face I’d forget easily.
We didn’t attend the dance rehearsal that day. My mom made her excuses and the dance teacher seemed to accept them, though I may have cost her some of her reputation. I honestly don’t know. We turned back and went home, talked a bit, I went to bed, then later we talked a bit more. I hardly remember anything that we said, but I do remember this. I never wanted to see my mom’s face like that again.
I had to sit down and have a real self examination of everything I had been doing. That’s when I started my public accountability shtick again, started using my love of pointless vanity metrics in as positive a way as I could manage. I made a promise publicly about my intent to change my habits, and made a resolution to start eating well again, start sleeping, start taking care of myself. Started keeping track of it every day. I made a resolution to get more active on social media, because though that wasn’t in any way a substitute for real social interaction, it was at least way better than what I had been doing for ages.
I knew I needed to build a support network, both for myself, and to act as a support for others. I had friends all over the country, legitimately close friends who I saw at least once a year, who could have helped me talk through any problems I had if they had just known about them. And of course I could have done the same for them. If only I had interacted with anyone at all.
So that was why, when I realized I had been slowly winding down my activity on social media again by the end of December, I felt it was important to renew that vow in the new year. Well, a long story for a simple outcome. I started posting on Facebook and other media outlets again in January. I tried to do it every day, but I’m a bit too nervous about online social interaction to commit to that. I preferred to carefully curate and post stories about my life, and man was that taking a long time. So I settled upon a happy medium of about once a week. Well and good. And I kept it up for quite a while. More on that later.
Of Music and Kinship
Goal number two was very closely linked to the first one. All part of wanting to build that support network of friends and family, something most people know to do naturally but I never used to even consider. I always used to lament that I was losing touch with people, but I never did anything about it before because I wasn’t convinced it was enough of a problem. Well not any more. I wanted to reach out and reconnect with people with whom I’d lost touch, and I decided to formalize that into a resolution for myself.
I’ve been doing that here and there all throughout the year, and through a variety of ways, including social media, but also through getting back into shared activities and interests such as goal three, music.
I used to give concerts and compete in Carnatic (South Indian Classical) music competitions every year from when I was about 5 years old to just before I joined college. And I knew just about everyone in the music community, in not just my local state of New Jersey but across the country. But because of a whole slew of factors (the majors and extraneous clubs didn’t help), I lost touch in college.
Now to me, the best thing about music is everything about it. I can’t imagine a world without being involved in music, so I had to have a nice long introspective discussion with myself on just how involved I wanted to be.
And the truth was, I wanted to be involved all the way I could. I don’t know if I can be any other way. So I decided to make a goal to get back in musical shape, and back in touch. And I’ve stuck to it. I’ve been going to concerts on the weekends again, with the exception of a brief hiatus when I was preoccupied with family bereavement. Soon, I’ll be going to India for a couple of months to focus on music exclusively. So far, that’s three for three. Sort of.
Which brings us to the most troublesome metric of the bunch:
My 100 Day GitHub Challenge and Where my Other Resolutions Fell Apart
Put succinctly, GitHub is a platform where people can track the progress of projects and other things by using git version control. People can save previous versions of things and track changes. Now, because GitHub accounts are free, almost every developer or dabbling in programming has one where they store code (mostly, sometimes other things too), and these accounts are often put on resumes, job applications, personal websites, and all manner of other professional interfaces to hiring managers and recruiters. One thing that really stands out in a GitHub account immediately is a commit streak, that is, the number of consecutive days where pieces of history are pushed to these version controlled repositories.
Well, I decided that I would try and cultivate a really impressive looking GitHub account by pursuing a 100 day commit streak on GitHub as one of my resolutions. That’s 100 days of writing code for open source projects. Ok, daunting, but not impossible.
So I tried getting started a few times, but the streaks always fell apart really fast. I often went on Facebook instead, or just “felt too tired” after a long day of work. I realized that I needed to change my approach or change my metric. I really examined how this metric actually measured any progress I made on open source projects.
And I realized it had been a vanity metric right from the start.
Committing on GitHub gave no indication of whether a piece of code did anything at all that was meaningful. It would have been easy to change a word here or there in some existing project every day and just add to the history that way. So using simply whether or not I made a commit each day as a metric actually caused me to treat my goal less seriously. I realized I needed to really focus on improving one project each day, rather than the goal of a commit each day, and the commits would come themselves.
So I did, I changed the goal and eventually the commits came rolling in. I started tracking my open projects in Trello and deciding on tasks that needed to be done, and every day, I’d take one task at least and go to work.
And well, obviously it took a lot of time and energy. In fact, I dropped all of my other resolutions just to work on this, because completing a task for a project requires hours of time a day, and I didn’t want to be distracted by the temptation of things like just going on Facebook for two hours instead (which I used to do in the beginning). So I dropped off of social media again, stopped going out of my way to reach out to people I had lost touch with — for the time being. It almost would seem like I was repeating the situation I was in when I graduated college.
Oddly enough though, I didn’t feel that way this time. I still went out with friends or went to concerts. I took care of my health (well comparatively, I’m starting to put on a little spare tire, but because of healthy eating, not too little 🐼).
I was measuring the right things this time though. I had clearly defined tasks, and they all measured real improvements on existing projects, not vague ideas of projects that I could “explore.” I pushed at it, because unlike my previous encounter with focusing on code alone, this time there was an end in my mind and a clear-cut path to progress each time. It gave me a sense of purpose, and I knew once my 100 days was over, I’d have no problem continuing the same steady flow of improvements whether or not a streak or some other flashy metric was involved. And for some reason, jacking out for that limited time frame and focusing on this goal made me feel really happy. I was happy, not just content, and it’s been the best feeling in the world.
Back on Track
And how’d I do? Sure enough, when I started finishing tasks every day, the commits followed right along. I managed to finish up several open projects I’d had in limbo for a very long time. All of which I can now list in my background. What’s more, I was then able to update my personal website to showcase them. I started six new projects which I can once again showcase. And check this out:
Check out the power of green! Well, maybe I’m cheating a little bit, because this includes commits I made for projects at work. But here’s the one that doesn’t include private contributions:
Still green enough for my goals, and progress enough for me. I managed to break 100 days this past Monday. Doing that gave me such a sense of release. A release that I’m fully able to enjoy as I return my focus to music and fly off to India. As I finish my last week of work before leaving, I’m finally able to say, I’m still happy. I can finally be proud of how much I’ve done in a year. Moreover, I can quantify it. Progress. Real, measured progress.
I was finally able to say I stuck true to genuine new year’s resolutions. And now? I’m back on social media telling the world about it. I’m back reaching out to old friends. I’m back in my music zone, I’m practicing every day, I’m listening analytically, I’m learning, it’s all coming together again.
I’m still working on projects, one issue at a time. But at least now, by having one measured task, one at the most, to complete per day, I’m no longer getting sucked into a hole. And guess what? Yesterday, at 104 days, I broke my streak. I didn’t do a damn thing all day. And I don’t care. I kept my resolution, the pressure’s off, and as long as I don’t go off the deep end — in either direction — eventually, my projects will get done, one clearly-defined legitimately useful task at a time.
More than anything else, my resolutions taught me balance.
And as far as vanity metrics go? I certainly learned my lesson there. The vanity metrics will see boosts naturally if you focus on the real actionable metrics. But to focus on the vanity metrics alone, to keep pushing to increase something that doesn’t really mean anything at all, that sense of false productivity will eventually crash and burn. And boy do you feel awful for having believed it the whole time.
