Numbers just for me

Metrics: from cynicism to insight.

I used to hold an unjustifiedly negative view of metrics. I saw them as a pointless exercise in appeasing nervous middle managers. In my mind, managers picked metrics to look good and developers made sure the metrics looked good even at the cost of actual business goals. This view is obviously overly cynical. But more importantly, this view closes my mind off from a tool that I might benefit from.

To open my mind a bit, I wanted to use metrics just for me to explore a question I have. I started with the feeling that I was wasting too much of my time. The question I wanted to answer was “How am I spending my time?”. To make this into a metric, I wanted to track “focus time” broken down by different categories. But I wanted focus time to be away from my phone. This restricted what I could track. So I ended up with a single metric: Time spent focused on coding.

Pretty quickly a clear insight emerged: My attention span is pretty bad. My coding sessions often only lasted 20 minutes. My problem wasn’t that I was not spending enouth time working, but that the way I was working was too erratic. Importantly, this insight gave me a clear step to address this feeling of wasted time: Work on your atttention span.

In the end, I got an appreciation that metrics can be useful and got actionable advice on something I was worried about.