What Gets Measured Gets Manipulated (Maybe)
The Time-Tracking App That Revolutionized My Record Keeping
After a decade of somewhat mindless time logging with Toggl Track and RescueTime, I finally discoverd a tool that provides real insight and turns time tracking into an effortless joy.
Join me in todays essay to find out how and why this happend!
I must’ve been a freshman at uni when I first heard it.
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
I'm sure you’ve come across this widely accepted but worn-out adage about the value of measuring things. Often attributed to Peter Drucker, to my knowledge, he never actually uttered these lines. It would surprise me if he did because my experience tells me that measuring stuff is but a small part of the success equation.
I like record keeping1 — it must be part of my joy of collecting things. However, as everyone sooner or later realizes, tracking is not enough. One must learn from the gathered data and take appropriate action. Otherwise, one ends up with a graveyard of unmined data. That’s not too bad per se, but it is somewhat sad to see all that precious data go to waste.
Sometimes, the act of tracking itself impacts you. You step on the scale in the morning and immediately either get a dopamine rush or a nasty punch in the stomach. Or take time tracking. If you record how you spend your hours, you will soon realize how much time you waste on certain things like email or social media. With the numbers right before you, you might be nudged to rework your relationship with these tools even though nothing really changed.
But these are just the happy parts of the story. Often, real insight and action are more complicated to mine. The fact that I spent 40 minutes daily on Email in 2017 added little value to my life. It may have motivated change, which is the necessary first step, but it didn’t tell me how actually to change. Only two years and many experiments later (around 2019), I finally established a sustainable inbox-zero practice. I now reach inbox zero daily and spend less than 10 minutes on it (6,2 minutes over the last six months, to be precise, and as fully automatically tracked by my new time tracking tool). A powerful and visible gain that initially resulted from keeping a time record, but that — importantly — also took a lot of working out afterward.
“Managing” something carries a connotation of success. Measuring by itself doesn’t guarantee management “success.” In an awful lot of cases, merely measuring doesn’t gain us anything, not even insight. It may even backfire, like stepping on a scale daily and getting puzzled by the strange workings of our bodies. Even if we end up with seemingly good data, as we experiment and play around with it, it turns out to be a dead end. It is only in the rarest of cases that the measurement leads to successful management and, thus, change. That’s why I say: What Gets Measured Might Get Manipulated. This makes the statement much weaker but a lot truer.
I deliberately try to reduce the talk about specific tools here, even though I can see from my metrics that such posts perform better. I do that because, for the most part, tools are ephemeral. They quickly rise and quickly fall. They are a means to an end. Anything I write about them was outdated yesterday. Tools concern the tip of the iceberg and don't yield gains in Productiveness.
However, a specific tooling choice can be an excellent example of an underlying approach. The frozen experience and lessons that are encoded into the design of a tool can impact us. So just like with my series on migrating from Evernote to Obsidian, my recent switch of time tracking tools contains some deeper lessons I want to share with you today.
I’ve been tracking time for nearly a decade. In this post, I will highlight what ten years of tracking have cost me in terms of effort, time, and money spent. I will also recap whether it was worth it based on what I got in return. Then, I will introduce you to a new time-tracking app I adopted recently and show how it compares and how the tooling impacted me in surprising ways.
Even if you are not currently interested in time tracking, this post may be interesting to follow for its deeper lessons. Or it may even inspire you to get started recording your time.