THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, March 6, 2020 |R11
JOURNAL REPORT|WORKPLACE TECHNOLOGY
I
s it worth taking the time to
walk to work, or am I better
off spending that half-hour
at my desk? Does social me-
dia distract me from my
work, or is it a useful way to
take a break and regain my fo-
cus? Are my most profitable
projects mostly short-term client
engagements, or do I make more
money on big, long-term gigs?
While there was a time when
only big companies could gener-
ate meaningful answers to such
questions, it’s now possible to
track an incredible range of per-
sonal performance metrics, ei-
ther inexpensively or even free.
Individuals can then use that
data to develop an accurate pic-
ture of their performance and
help identify potential areas for
improvement.
Allyouhavetodoisfigure
out what you want to track—and
then set up a system to capture
and analyze that data.Choosing metrics
It’s helpful to think of your met-
rics in two buckets: the data that
measure the effort you’re putting
in, and the data that measure
how that effort is paying off.
Begin by thinking about the
outcomes you want to measure—
the two or three numbers that
truly capture what matters to
the success of your career or
business. It might be revenue,
focused work time, number of
sales, or total output (whether
you measure that as the number
of PowerPoint decks you create,
the number of words you type or
the total lines of code you write
in a week).
Since I earn my living through
writing, I evaluate my own pro-
ductivity by tracking how much
focused writing time I log each
workday. Rather than tracking
word count, which would include
all the typing I do in the form of
Facebook comments or email re-
plies, I like to measure the
amount of time I spend in the
programs and sites where I do
real writing as well as on any
files in my “Writing” folder. I
use an app called Timing that
tracks everything I do on my
Mac, and categorizes any time I
spend on focused writing basedThe author
analyzed the
effect of exercise
and of Facebook
time on her
writing.more writing done on the days
where I spent a lot of time on
Facebook because those were days
where I spent more time on my
computer, overall.
So I dug a little deeper, dividing
my “Facebook time” and “focused
writing time” numbers by the total
number of hours I spent on my
computer each day. When I reran
my regressions, it turned out that
there was no real relationship be-
tween how much of my computer
time I spent writing, and how
much time I spent on Facebook or
how much I walked on any given
day.
In the case of my Facebook as-
sessment, I was looking at whether
I needed to change my work habits
by blocking Facebook from my
computer during the day. My re-
sults suggest that I can stop fret-
ting about whether Facebook is a
problematic distraction.
In the case of my exercise as-
sessment, I was trying to figure
out if I’m better off taking time to
walk, or getting straight to my
desk. Both sets of results suggest
that there’s no real productivity
win from exercise.
Does that mean that I should
stop exercising so I can spend
more time at my desk?
As tempting as it was to believe
that conclusion—I hate exercise,
and I love my computer—I realized
it was missing part of the equation.
In addition to walking, I try to
swim several times a week, and my
data set didn’t reflect that activity.
Once I incorporated my swim-
ming days, I discovered that while
the percentage of computer time
spent on focused writing was
roughly the same for both swim
and nonswim days, the average
number of hours spent writing was
more than 60% higher on swim
days. It was enough to relieve me
of the fear that exercise actually
hurts my productivity.
I don’t plan to stop here. Just
like data-driven decision making
has become the new norm for busi-
nesses, my plan is to track and an-
alyze my personal metrics monthly
or quarterly—while coming up
with new hypotheses and metrics
onceortwiceayear.
In fact, I’ve already started to
collect data to answer my next
question: Do I get more written on
days when my calendar is wide
open, or crammed with things to
do? My gut tells me one thing, but
the data may very well tell me
something else.Dr. Samuelis a technology
researcher and author of “Work
Smarter With Social Media.”
Email her [email protected].ThePowerofPersonalMetrics
What can you do to
make yourself more
productive at your job?
What things hold you
back? It is time to start
measuring yourself.on the rules I’ve set up.
Next, identify the aspects of
your life that you suspect affect
these success factors. Maybe it’s
email response time or how
much time you spend on work
tasks versus web surfing. Maybe
it’s how often you post to social
media or how much time you
spend working at the office ver-
sus somewhere else. Maybe it’s
how many messages you send
out that get read or how much
you exercise.Generating testable
hypotheses
Next, take a moment to jot down
your intuitions about how the
causal factors you’ve identified
might affect your business and
professional goals. For instance:
The more quickly I respond to
emails from prospective custom-
ers, the more likely I am to close
the deal. Or: Employees I person-
ally recruit via Twitter, Facebook
or LinkedIn stay longer than the
people our HR team hires. Or: I
get more leads from individually
written emails with quirky sub-ject lines than from mass-blasting
a bunch of prospects with the
same message.
The two hypotheses I recently
tested: 1) I can log more focused
writing time if I begin my work-
day with a brisk walk; and 2) I
spend more time on my writing
when I limit my Facebook time.Setting up your metrics
Once you’ve decided which met-
rics you’re going to track and
which hypotheses you’re going
to test, you can choose the com-
bination of tools to collect the
data you need.
There are all sorts of tracking
tools available, and they’re
pretty easy to find, once you
know what you want to track. Or
you might want to track things
manually. In my own case, the
data I need to test my hypothe-
ses come from two sources: the
Timing app, which measures the
amount of time I spend on Face-
book and on writing apps while
at my computer, and Apple
Health, which logs my daily step
count and activity level.Learning and improving
with personal metrics
Now comes the useful part: how
all this tracking will actually
make you more productive.
Resist the urge to obsessively
review your metrics, since you
could be distorting the results as
you find yourself performing for
your metric tracker. Don’t even
glance at your numbers until at
least a week has gone by. Even
then, just look at the numbers to
make sure your trackers are
working properly, and don’t try to
analyze your data.
In my case, I tested my hypoth-
eses using about nine months of
retrospective data—that is, data I
had already captured, before I got
interested in thinking about the
impact of Facebook and exercise
on my productivity.
Once you’ve got one to three
months of data, it’s time to ana-
lyze your habits and results. I
generally prefer to use a spread-
sheet to look for patterns.
If you’re daunted by the idea of
regression analysis, you may find
that your easiest option is to eye-
ball your data and see if any pat-terns jump out at you. But the
value of statistical analysis is that
it can help you make sense of a
large and more representative set
of data, and will catch patterns
your eyeballs may not, while en-
suring you don’t imagine a rela-
tionship that isn’t actually there.
There are plenty of places to
find accessible, step-by-step in-
structions that walk you through
the work of doing a regression
analysis in Excel and that help
you interpret the results.
The initial results of my own
analysis surprised me. I actually
did less focused writing on the
days with a high step count, and
I did more focused writing on the
days where I spent a lot of time
on Facebook. Apparently, exercise
didn’t do much for my concentra-
tion. And maybe Facebook really
does provide a refreshing break
throughout the day?
Still, I wondered if I was sim-
ply spending less time at my com-
puter on the days when I was
walking around, running errands.
That would explain why high-step
days were low-writing days. Con-
versely, it seemed likely that I gotBegin by thinking about the outcomes
you want to measure. Next, identify the
aspects of your life that you suspect
affect these success factors.You don’t need to do sophis-
ticated analysis to get in-
sights from data you have on
hand or can collect easily.
Here are six simple projects:
Find your most profitable
types of work.Categorize all
the projects you’ve done in
the past year or two, in any
way that makes sense to you.
List the time spent and reve-
nue for each individual proj-
ect, then calculate the aver-
age revenue per hour for
each category.
Tame compulsive phone
use.Estimate how many
times you pick up your phone
each day, and how many min-
utes or hours you spend on it.
Then track your actual usage.
Chances are you’ll want to
set a goal for bringing those
numbers down.
Track productivity against
sleep or exercise.Use a time-
tracking tool to see how
much of your daily computer
time is spent in the applica-
tions or on the tasks you’ve
defined as productive, or sim-
ply set three goals for each
day and log how many you
achieve. Then compare your
daily productivity stats with
information from a fitness
tracker to see if you get more
done on days when you’ve
slept more and/or exercised.
Improveemail effective-
ness.Install an email-tracking
add-on to get metrics on
when you email and when
you get responses. Schedule
your email writing for the
times when you’re most likely
to get a quick response.
Focus your public profile.
Set up a spreadsheet to cate-
gorize your articles, presenta-
tions, blog entries or social-
media posts by topic. Use a
social-media analytics tool to
find mentions on social media
for each one. Average by
topic to see which topics gar-
ner the most attention.
Calibrate social-media
use.Use your time sheet or
productivity tracker to calcu-
late your number of produc-
tive or billable hours a day for
the past week. Compare
these numbers with the
amount of time you’ve spent
on social media each day. Do
you get more or less done on
the days when you spend
more time online?
—Alexandra Samuel6 Easy
Metrics
Projects
PH0TO ILLUSTRATION BY WSJ, PHOTO BY GRANT HARDER FOR WSJ, GRAPHICS VIA ISTOCK