Last week, Wells Fargo laid off a bunch of its remote workers.
It turns out that these employees were “simulating keyboard activity” (with a program/device that automatically typed keys or moved their mouse when they weren’t at their computer).
Why;
Because this is how these employees were rated:
Not by how many customers they brought in, not by how many relationships they cultivated, but by how many hours they were active on their computers.
So that’s exactly what these workers gave them.
Remember, this is the same bank that told employees in 2017: “Enroll as many customers as possible in extra banking.”
The result;
Millions of customers unknowingly had credit cards and savings and brokerage accounts illegally created in their names, hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and destroyed goodwill for Wells Fargo.
Why did both of these comically bad judgment errors happen?
by Bloomberg ,Matt Levine, well said:
Two basic principles of management, regulation and life are:
- You get what you measure.
- What you measure will be played.
This is really just a start: You get what you measure, but only exactly what you measure. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the overall good you thought you measured up to.
If you want hard workers and count the working hours, you will have many workers surfing the web until midnight.
I came across this story last week and immediately thought about how this very motivation-and-unexpected-results plays out in our lives every day.
We download Duolingo to learn to chat with a native speaker of their language. Months later, we’re checking in daily so the Owl doesn’t yell at us, we’re desperate to keep our daily streak going… and we can only say “I found a blue ostrich in the library.”
We lie in bed, waving our hand above our head like a madman, because FitBit tells us we need 500 more steps to reach 10,000 a day. (,Here is the history of the 10k step rule, By the way…)
I used to “meditate” every day for 6 months so I can create my Headspace meditation series. Sometimes I would even open the app and just let the meditation play so I could take credit for it even though I didn’t meditate…THE WHOLE REASON I HAD DOWNLOADED THE APP.
We tell ourselves we want to “read more”, but then we keep track of how many books we read. This motivates us to read books quickly (without keeping any of them), rather than tackling bigger challenges like War & Peace the re-reading our favorite books to collect more lessons.
WHY do we want to read more? To learn things or to be entertained! The ,the number of books, or WHICH books, doesn’t matter,:
Social media started as a way to connect with friends. These days, social media is big business and the only marketing tool for many creators. Because these companies track “time on app” and “attention”… social media is now a hellscape of rage.
The most engaging content is filtered to the top: infuriating, factually inaccurate, awful content designed to enrage and fear. Even most of my favorite wellness creators these days spend their time making reaction videos to the worst wellness misinformation because that’s the only type of content that gets traction.
(No wonder so many people avoid it ,The Dark Forest of the Internet,!).
All of these things make up a fascinating tapestry of how the human brain works and how good our brains are at taking a measurement and learning wrong lesson from this measurement!
What are you measuring?
The majority of people visit NerdFitness.com to “lose weight”.
This is the one metric that everyone tends to track. Every ad talks about how to lose weight fast. They see the number on the scale and let that number determine how they feel about themselves that day.
This is the wrong metric to focus solely on:
We don’t really want to “lose weight”. What we want is to lose fat while maintaining the muscle we have (or building muscle).
If our ONLY goal is weight loss, severe calorie restriction and endless exercise can result in a lower number on the scale. BUT! If we don’t change our relationship with food and get enough of the right macronutrients and micronutrients, we’ll end up feeling lethargic, hungry, and miserable…and then enjoying ourselves when life gets in the way.
If we strength train while eating enough protein and in a caloric deficit, we will actually lose weight slower than if we were hungry and did hours of cardio. BUT, we will lose fat while maintaining muscle.
The scale should only be ONE part of how we ,evaluate our progress,:
After all, the number on the scale is going to ,they vary from day to day,:
- If we went out to eat last night.
- if we ate too much salt yesterday.
- If we carry extra weight of water.
- If we have our period.
- any number of reasons.
So, knowing that what we choose to watch is important, how do we use it to our advantage?
What to watch, what not to watch
Remember, what gets measured gets better, so let’s be smart about what we track.
We can ask, “What do I really want to happen? Is this the right metric for this goal?”
- Trying to “eat better”: ,Track your protein intake ,and the number of fruits/vegetables consumed daily. If these are the first two things on your plate for every meal, your weight will start to change without you focusing on it.
- Trying to build a “,beach body,”? Great, let’s go ,build some muscle,. Track your workouts and record exactly how many sets and reps. Then do ONE more next time. The target; Progressive overload for the win! become stronger,
- Want to read more? Don’t track ‘books read’, which might result in you choosing shorter books or speed reading, but instead track ‘time spent reading’. This can include audio books, reading old books, anything else. Curate your reading list ,like a river, not a to-do list,!
Finally, there are many things that we probably do NOT need to monitor, or should be careful about monitoring.
There is an entire biohacker community that prioritizes tracking the smallest detail in a variety of metrics, many of which are irrelevant or may lead to negative results.
Here’s something we get asked a lot about:
If you are not diabetic and have been advised by a doctor, you do not need to wear a continuous glucose monitor. Temporary spikes in glucose after eating a meal are completely normal.
(,This podcast, from my friend Dr. Spencer Nadolsky does a good job of explaining why you don’t need a glucose monitor unless you’re diabetic).
Here’s something I used to watch but had given up on:
I used to religiously track my sleep with an Oura ring and the AppleWatch, but then I’d get stressed in the middle of the night and worry that I’d messed up my “sleep score”…which was negatively impacting the very activity I was trying to track to improve. These days, I worry a lot less about tracking “good sleep” and just do my best to be in bed for 8 hours, whether I sleep or not.
And to a larger question of philosophy of life:
Be mindful of how social media distorts the scorecard you use to track your progress in life! It’s very easy to get carried away: “Work hard to make money to spend on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like” Success in life is not measured by the size of our house or the value of our car or the number in our bank account.
Putting it all together:
When it comes to personal development or health improvement, it helps to ask, “Why am I optimizing and doing this? actually help me to get the result Really I want;”
Then we can decide if we’re playing with the right scorecard and keeping our focus on the right metric.
I would like to hear from you: what’s a metric you USED to prioritize but no longer track? And what’s the important metric you choose to prioritize these days?
Hit reply on this and let me know!
-Stephanos
