Ask HN: What metrics do you pay attention to?
People love their metrics. Whether it's how many steps they made in a day, or their karma score on Hackernews, etc
But social media metrics aside: what other metrics do you pay attention to in your daily life?
One obvious one for many people would be their bottom line / profit margin. But that aside, what numbers do you pay attention to each day?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadThe percentage of the week that I make it to the gym. My goal is 4x (M-Th). I like to hit my goal. Aside: if anyone has felt their mental health slip or having trouble sleeping - absolute start going to the gym. The affect it has had on my life cannot be understated.
One rep maxes.
Internal thermometer of the sheet pan meals I make every other day.
Podcast revenue.
Amount of dirty laundry in the hamper.
From my personal life -
I guess stepping on the scale in the mornings, haha. That's a depressing one to watch. There are the obvious personal finance metrics as well.
Also keeping an eye on inflation... maybe Covid infection numbers as well since those seem to be in the news alot. It's kind of hard not to see those numbers lately.
It's not a metric with 100% certainty, but if you tell me you have 1000 wishlisters, or 10,000, or 100,000 I can tell you roughly the range of sales that gets you.
I know publishers like Playway do exactly what you describe with all of their <insert niche job here> Simulator series of games, but it's not my thing. I use my wishlist counts to check I'm on the right track, to keep encouraged when development feels like a grind, to help justify putting a certain amount of $$ towards its development. If I was really struggling to get wishlists I would seriously consider changing the game's presentation substantially, or changing to work to something else, but I've not yet been in that situation. But in that case it would be a pretty decent signal that something about how the game looks isn't chiming with potential customers.
There are other useful metrics too, how many YouTube views did the announcement trailer get? Did it get posted to reddit and do okay there? How many people have joined the Discord? And so on and on, so it's not all one thing.
Given the not-perfect-but-pretty-good correlation between number-of-wishlists to number-of-first-year-sales it's a helpful number to help budget/forecast my business.
But, it's harder to imagine how Steam wishlist counts lead to totally distorted accounts. Unless someone is botting your Steam store page and the wishlisters don't exist, they're all still potential customers, and 5,000 wishlisters means something and 50,000 wishlisters means something.
There's lots of conversation about 'quality' of Steam wishlisters between developers. For example, Steam Fest is an event that Steam runs every now and then with game demos and there's very prominent 'wishlist this game' buttons. It's generally accepted that these wishlisters are 'worth less' than if they come from YouTube or PCGamer or even other sources upon Steam. So if 90% of your wishlist count comes through Steam Fests, yeah, you probably do have a distorted metric to work with. But no, I haven't experienced this myself.
But by now I'm more of a collector than a player, because playing games literally costs more than buying them.
pomodoro count
<= $70(summer)/$100(winter) Electricity consumption / quarter
>= 1 book chapter / day
>= 1 time leaving the apartment / day
income - expenses > 0
Number of steps (10k/day goal)
Number of cups of coffee (going for the high score here)
Bedtime/wake up time (need 7 hrs)
Time spent focused on kids (want an hour of dedicated time with them on weekends, not including meals and taking them to/from school).
Portfolio balance (working toward escape velocity).
Hours studying language (targeting 1 hr/day).
Alcoholic drinks per day/week (try to stay under 2/day, 4/week).
- Health & Well-being: Step count (Apple Watch). Weight (Withings Scale). Meditation minutes. Sleep (Whoop). First sunlight exposure (circadian entrainment). Lunch and dinner times (circadian entrainment). Water consumption.
- Work: Time spent on Conjure. Time spent on client work.
- Self Development: Books read. Time spent reading. Time spent consuming inspiring material (mindset).
I mostly track them manually or automatically in Conjure[1] (disclaimer I'm building it) and then link them to Habits and Objectives in it.
I also tend to add and remove different measures/metrics at different times based on what is going on in my life, or pause certain ones for a while if I'm burnt out and need less overhead in my day-to-day.
[1] https://conjure.so/
- Tracking hours / quality of sleep (with the SleepCycle app)
- Weights I lift in compound exercises like bench press or deadlift (pen + paper). It's motivating to see progress.
- General daily well being on a scale from 1-10 (google doc). This is divided into my perceived productivity and mood. I seem to be quite erratic with tracking this recently though - I might build a simple app with reminders to help me. The scores I collect can be easily looked up in relation with my other notes (todo lists, basic journal etc.) to find what affects me the most.
- Budgeting (revolut)
Business:
Background - I'm working on an app to make online meetings more fun. At the core I have rooms where guests can hang out and engage in different activities. The metrics I focus most for now are:
- Monthly unique guests that join any kind of room as my guiding metric.
- Currently experimenting with total aggregated human time spent in the rooms daily / weekly / monthly. This seems to be a better metric because in contrast with a plain MAU it also indicates engagement and general impact (would love some feedback on that - for more context on the app: https://flat.social).
- Conversion rates from different call to actions spread across various subpages.
- Core user journey funnels to see where new users get stuck so I can clean up any confusing areas of the app out (copy, buttons, navigation etc.)
For me personally:
- Whoop Recovery % / Cals burned
- Number of hours working out per week
- Calories per day (not tracked well)
- Monthly business revenue / number of projects completed
- Net worth
Same applies for running my business. Instead of focusing all my efforts on revenue, I'm keeping a close eye on metrics in my control (e.g. number of people I touched base with this week)
To flip this around, I stopped tracking HN and reddit upvotes and really all social media "likes" of any kind. I mostly did this by closing all my accounts (except HN and reddit). I also removed all analytics from all of my side projects. I have found this has shifted my creation process from "what will get me likes?" to "what do I really want to make?" and that's been very positive.
- Winnings/Losses $ each week on FanDuel/DraftKings
- MPGe while driving with a Prius Prime
Professionally? Right now not enough of those needed and to much of pointless ones. I try to get people to use the proper KPIs for what they are doing so, it seems to be quite an uphill battle. Because who really cares when POs are placed as long as they are delivered on time (which nobody is monitoring right now...)?
Quasi-related to the body battery is minimal heart rate while sleeping (the watches automatic "resting" number is often higher, so I look at the chart). Relative to 2-week moving average it's a leading indicator of illness. I have nice charts for my recent covid and common cold, 1-2 days before the symptoms I could see unexplained (e.g. no drinks) higher levels. In absolute terms it correlates with endurance training and recovery after long training sessions (it goes lower with training in general, after a long session it is higher for 1-3 days, when it's back to low level it's full recovery, good time for further training).
Both help in simple decisions such as go to bed earlier, training intensity, whether evening coding session could be productive or better watch a movie, etc.
As a side note, it's funny how alcohol affects both metrics - same as illness + very low battery the next day. The metrics make me think twice and when both are bad it's better to skip drinking even if the context/schedule and subjective feelings are OK for it.
I do not care about sleep phases or when the watches think I fall asleep, it's approximately correct and that's enough. Hours of sleep mean much less than the body battery increase overnight.
I also track sleep total and sleeping pulse. Long run sleeping pulse is a good indicator of my general health. Insufficient sleep will kill my energy.
I also weight myself and take weight circumference. Should stay stable or trend down.
This takes about 5 min in morning. Time well spent.
It takes a while between drinking and it having an affect (variant on numerous factors) but I found the morning fog within an hour of waking up was much reduced just by drinking immediately on waking.
- Time spent reading daily: my min goal is 30 minutes. - Time spent on social media: trying to lower this to as close to 0 as possible, currently limiting to about 20 minutes per day. - Amount of sleep
Professional:
- Average ranking position for all keyword targets (I'm an SEO/digital marketer) - Amount of work hours invested (I'm a remoter, so I want to make sure I hit AT LEAST 8). PS - this is never a problem LOL.
The rest of the metrics lost meaning to me - they fluctuate too much depending on the weather / schedule / other factors. They also do not affect me as much as sleep.
Before this turns rough, philosophical or greedy… it is just related to pretty basic fulfillment of a pretty modest life.
>What metrics do you pay attention to?
About the same. Reading only the headline, I expected business metrics not personal and jotted down the following. It really turned out more personal than anything.
To the extent that I'm working with equipment or material, am I getting a good amount of performance compared to what can be expected within the reasonable range? Is the cost appropriate for the performance?
Same with the people. Am I getting a good amount of value creation or invoiceable activity overall? Once again within the reasonable range.
Same with the clients. Am I giving them their money's worth in ways that sustain or grow operations?
Everyone needs to be enthusiastically capable and involved in pushing the client satisfaction level to the upper end of what's reasonable and keeping it there. Not only to remain within striking distance of the occasional unreasonable requirement.
Everyone needs to be smiling enough for you to hear it in their voice, and the equipment if any needs to be humming along nicely.
- Total value of my investments and savings
- Time spent sleeping
At this time, there is very little else in my life that requires me to change my routine.
- Weight (MyFitnessPal) - on a cut right now, and I'll log progress when it decreases
- Time in VR/calories burned (aiming for 40 mins/250 cals minimum, but typically do significantly more)
- COVID - I'm high risk for a while, so I do a daily LFD
- Donations received on Open Collective
- Sleep - Diet - Exercise - Execution (how well did I did what I should be doing) - Mood - Social (how much did I socialize, spend time with loved ones etc)
The value is:
- During the day I might consider: "what would it take to end this day on a 3 in Diet", for example - When I enter the values for a day, I reflect over what went well/wrong - which can help me improve
Every morning, I get an email with a reminder to fill in my Daily Score for the previous day. It takes 30-60 seconds - sometimes a bit more, if it sets off a chain of thoughts.
It started out a spreadsheet, then I built a simple web-app for it about a year ago.
I often thought about sharing it, but doubt it makes sense without a lot of explanation about the value being in the self-reflection - not the data.
I think the explanations required around the process/reflection makes it too difficult to "market" - so I have put it off.
Honestly - the data analysis and looking back - has taught me pretty very little I did not already know.
Yes, I can observe that some metrics almost always align, because exercising makes me more aware of my diet (not wanting to "waste" the effort made at the gym) - and that my mood and productivity are closely aligned as well.
I wish I could say I gained some big insight from looking back at the data, but really it is mostly jsut about the forced reflection here and now.