Is It a Metric or an Obsession?

I’ve been thinking about why some people can track their progress on goals without going insane, while others turn into the guy who weighs himself four times a day and has a panic attack when his Fitbit dies…

You’d think there’d be some obvious personality difference: anxious people obsess over metrics and chill people don’t. But I know extremely anxious people who barely track anything, and extremely chill people who have elaborate spreadsheets for monitoring their habits.

So that can’t be it.

The obvious theory: measurement helps when you’re measuring the right things, hurts when you’re measuring the wrong things.

Okay, but what counts as “right”?

Everyone says measure your inputs, not your outputs. You can control whether you write for an hour, you can’t control whether your blog post goes viral. Makes sense in theory.

In practice I’ve watched people torture themselves over inputs (did I really focus for a full hour or was I just staring at the screen?) while others track pure vanity metrics and seem fine.

The problem isn’t the metric itself, it’s whether you’ve internalized the metric as part of your identity. If you think of yourself as “someone who writes 500 words per day,” missing a day becomes an identity crisis. You’re not just behind on a goal, you’re failing at being the person you believe you are. But if you think of the 500 words as a useful tool for making progress on projects you care about, missing a day is just information.

“I missed yesterday, wonder what came up, should I adjust the target or just get back to it tomorrow?”

Same metric, completely different relationship.

One creates obsession, the other creates useful feedback.