The inevitable weakness of metrics

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**Bryan Gardiner** (0:34)
Bryan Gardiner writes, The inevitable weakness of metrics.
There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement. Like a lot of people, bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I initially started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. As a sedentary technology journalist, I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, to get outside more, and where possible, to bring order to some of the messiness and uncertainty of my daily existence. These all seemed to be things that could be improved with the cool clarity of numbers.
Self-quantifiers often get stereotyped as obsessive self-optimizers, and many of them are. But my reasons for producing and collecting personal data were less about life-maxing and more about life-meaning, at least at first. As most people who know me will attest, I do not have now nor have I ever possessed a productivity mindset. I'm also not at all that interested in life hacks, shortcuts, or new ways to compare myself with other people. Instead, what I wanted out of metrics, what I hoped I could divine from a never-ending stream of numbers about my health, work, and social life, was something more elusive. Self-knowledge. This was my first mistake. The idea that the more we know the better is so profoundly embedded in our culture that it feels weird to even point it out. Since at least as far back as the Enlightenment, the primary way we've all agreed to go about knowing more has been through measurement and quantification. After all, more knowledge, more data, leads to better decisions, which leads to happier, more fulfilled people. Or so we're told, and with increasing frequency, in the era of AI. When two Wired magazine editors, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, coined the term quantified self in 2007, and helped launch the movement we are all now helplessly a part of, they were essentially selling this very idea. Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved, wrote Kelly in an early blog post, doing his best impression of Lord Kelvin. So, we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. Almost twenty years later, that quest is easier than ever, thanks to a flood of devices, apps, and websites, all designed to help us build our self-knowledge through numbers.
My first tool was a small plastic clip-on Fitbit I started using in 2011 It did one thing, count the number of steps I took in a day. As a lifelong video game player, I was already well acquainted with the motivational power of simple scoring systems, and I hoped my new gadget would offer the gentle numerical nudge I thought I needed to step away from my Twitter feed and, if not touch grass, at least walk next to some. Walking also seemed to be one of the few times I had what could charitably be called intelligent ideas, which seemed like another promising by-product of doing more of it.
Alas, that was short-lived. I can't tell you precisely when getting out into nature more or thinking smarter thoughts stopped mattering to me as goals, but I suspect it took no more than a few weeks. What I can say with certainty is that my initial goal of 6,000 daily steps quickly turned into 10,000, which then jumped to 15,000 and eventually settled at 20,000 for years. Stories about becoming a steps guy are cliched at this point, and they've earned that status for a reason. It didn't take long for me to trade in pedometers for heart-rate monitors. I also started running smart watches, sleep-tracking rings, and an embarrassing number of macronutrient tabulating apps. Outside the health and fitness realm, my early career as a journalist also happened to coincide with the rise of social media and web analytics tools like Chartbeat, which promised to further quantify difficult-to-measure aspects of my life like job success and impact, by tracking things like page views, followers, retweets, likes, and all sorts of other attentional metrics that now carry great weight.