This year, I have:¹

• Read 144 books.
• Watched 41 movies.
• Beaten 92 games.
• Made 10 games.
• Written 12 blog posts.

These aren’t a complete assessment of everything I’ve done—they completely ignore work, socializing, chores, and any other activity that I’m not actively or passively measuring, like watching TV or listening to podcasts. They’re either metrics I have access to through various logging sites or ones I’ve kept track of myself.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of chasing metrics or checking off items as a list as a means of productivity. After all, it’s one of the more powerful tools we have to accomplish things. They’re also ways that we can trick ourselves into feeling productive while not making any progress towards our real goals.

I wish I didn’t have access to some of those numbers. By giving myself a number to be incremented, I’m not just biasing what activities I do, but how I do those activities.

Pointless Metrics & Checklists

Most of the games I play are on the shorter side, with a game having to be really compelling to keep me playing for longer than ten hours or so. I’m not upset with that—too many time sinks would have kept me away from my more fulfilling pursuits.

However, I have beaten 92 games so far this year.² Were those all games that were worth beating, or did I finish some just to increment that number?

Almost certainly the latter. This bias towards checking items off of a list or increasing a number isn’t exclusive to me; you can see similar mentalities with people focusing on increasing or decreasing the size of their backlog or grinding levels and battlepasses in games they wouldn’t enjoy without them.

The books I read tend to be on the shorter side (averaging 287 pages), and I tend to subtly resent a book when it ends up being too long. I’ll also finish some books that I should just drop. That’s partly because finding a new book I’m motivated to read can be tricky, but also partly because I want to hit my 100 book goal on Goodreads.³

It’s not like I’m reading the classics, either: my current pursuits are the Cadderly Quintet, a five book series of poorly-written D&D stories and reading through the entirety of the original Star Wars canon in timeline order.⁴ Not exactly high literature. To be clear, that’s not to say that trash fiction can’t be enjoyable and worthwhile to read, but it’s not something I should be optimizing for.

Movies are not currently my vice, but I’ve had spouts of watching movies intensely, sometimes watching multiple in a day.

Each of these has the capability to go from a pastime someone is doing for enjoyment to a chore they’re doing for a feeling of productivity. I see this often online with people who aren’t enjoying games, but feel like they need to “conquer their backlog” or play all the big releases that come out, when it’d be in their best interest to take a break from gaming and take up another hobby.

This, of course, has also happened to me. It’s what spawned my “no games month” in February, which has the dual purpose of healthy self-deprivation and re-kindling my interest in playing games.

Useful Metrics & Checklists

But those are my non-creative hobbies. What about writing blog posts or making games?

Having metrics for the amount of games I’ve made does shape the games I make. My 2019 goal of making a game every month⁵ certainly devolved into me playing the ref.⁶ On the other hand, when I gave myself free rein to work on a longer game, I ended up having nothing released that year.⁷

This year I met my numeric goal of six games and more.⁸ I think my desire for some level of polish prevents me from optimizing for churning out the highest number of games.

Similarly, I had an ad hoc goal of 26 blog posts last year, which I didn’t come close to doing.⁹ If I started making goals for blog posts, would I write rambling, worthless posts in lieu of more valuable ones?¹⁰ I don’t think that I would.

For games, I think there’s a clear reason why I’m not falling into that trap: I’m already choosing the game equivalent of a 200 page book, and it’s still a lot of work. Creating something as simple as FreeCell¹¹ took me a month to do.

Managing making games or blog posts is a motivation game. Optimizing for metrics would suck my motivation and end up being self-defeating. Writing and creating games requires more active involvement than reading books or playing games, so “grinding creation” is less of a plausible outcome.

Having goals, even if I don’t meet them, for tasks that I actually want to do is something that helps motivate me to create. I have yet to experience an instance where creating a checklist for tasks I want to accomplish has backfired.

But Can Useful Metrics Backfire

Yes.

There’s an adage you’ve probably heard of, Goodhart’s law, that states that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure. That’s generally used at an organizational management level, and I’ve found it fairly accurate.

For something where it’s you pushing your own progress, as long as you consciously think about why you’re computing those metrics, whether they’re valuable, and allow yourself to fail, they can work. That said, that’s a tall order, and it’s easy to slip into metric-chasing mindset and be lured by the illusion of productivity it gives.

For me, having a game creation goal has been useful. Instead of seeing it as an objective to meet at all costs, it instead acts as a set of progression checkpoints and incremental deadlines. Those are both useful for helping me conjure up motivation to work on projects when I’m in a slump.

If I had tried to reach my blog post goal last year, it would not have been pretty. I would’ve ended up writing a bunch of posts that I did not want to write to meet the deadline. I know writing weekly or biweekly can work for some people, but for me my motivation comes in fits and starts—completely acceptable when working on a hobby.

Allowing myself to fail out of the goal and reassess it as infeasible allowed me to avoid falling into the trap of working to the metric.

Takeaways

What we’re tracking will often end up modifying our behavior, even if it’s not for something that we consciously value. Be wary about what you’re tracking to ensure that it’s only things you actually want to optimize for, but check periodically to make sure it’s not warping how you interact with the creation process in an undesirable way.