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0 pointsquickthrower25y ago0 comments

Habit forming works better. That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. Or a dog walking OKR. Check out tiny habits.

I find performance metrics tiresome these days, especially at work. As a programmer you are doing creative and fairly reactive work, yet you are trying to please some performance metric written 2 months ago for the quarter, which with new information is BS so now you need to negotiate to ignore the metric.

I probably have metric fatigue.

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wpietri5y ago

I don't think those things are opposites. I don't exactly do personal OKRs, but I'm definitely working towards goals. To hit some of those goals, I build habits. And to build those habits, I carefully track how well I'm doing on that.

E.g., I had a goal of being more fit. I wanted a habit of daily exercise, so I set a target of 10k steps/day. My current streak is 33 days, but I'd say the habit is still forming. I'm going to shoot for 2 months and see how strong the habit feels then.

I do agree that bad metrics are terrible, though. My sympathies!

oarsinsync5y ago

Be careful with streaks. There’s another thread on today (about phone addiction) that goes into more depth how streaks can be harmful, but as an anecdote, I had a 500+ day streak on my Apple Watch fitness rings until the watch developed a fault intra day and I didn’t notice til the end of the day, breaking the streak. There’s no way to reset that, or show me new streak information. So I gave up entirely. The pandemic didn’t start for another 3-4 months, by which time I’d given up already.

wpietri5y ago

Fair point. Luckily, for me streaks become boring. They're just a tool for getting into a habit. Once I have the habit, I'll drop tracking the formal tracking of that particular metric. I really can only track so many things at once, and so I'll set some other goal.

barrucadu5y ago

> That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR.

I do have a teeth-brushing OKR because I forget to do it otherwise, to the point where I've had to have two teeth removed.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsquickthrower25y ago0 comments

Habit forming works better. That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. Or a dog walking OKR. Check out tiny habits.

I probably have metric fatigue.

0 comments

wpietri5y ago

I do agree that bad metrics are terrible, though. My sympathies!

oarsinsync5y ago

wpietri5y ago

barrucadu5y ago

> That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR.

I do have a teeth-brushing OKR because I forget to do it otherwise, to the point where I've had to have two teeth removed.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse