Getting The Most Done With Your Time Part 4 - Metrics

This blog used to get no readers at all.  Since I started promoting it on Twitter a bit, it has started to get a few viewers and is now getting the odd referral from Google.  Hi guys.  You are still a small, select group.  But I hope you are enjoying it and finding it useful.  I don't plan on optimising this blog to get as many readers as possible or seeking out compelling content to build traffic or anything like that.  However, I think it only fair to keep the handful of running stories going so that I don't leave things hanging.  To which end, the working methods experiment I am working on has developed a bit since I last wrote about it, so here is an update.


In Part 3 of this series I revealed the experimental design I am going to use.  This was a very conventional and appropriate approach for the problem I was trying to solve.  I have identified the different ways of boosting my productivity and I have set up a design where I try each of the in combination with the others so I can see which ones affect my results and which ones don't.

But there was one aspect of it with which I was unhappy.  The whole point of what I am doing is to be able to do some sums to work out which factors were important.  In order to do that I needed some metrics to analyse.  I had originally intended to simply give each day a score, but the trouble with that is it is highly subjective.   I really wanted to have something that really measured my progress.  In the end I have settled on using the total value of billable hours I achieve in a given day.  

On the face of it this is a pretty lousy measure.  Try as I might I don't get an even return from projects on which I work.  And worse of all it doesn't capture work I do to build up financial well being in the future by promoting my business and developing new products.  But it does have the benefit that it is clearly measurable and I cannot subconsciously manipulate it.  I have also reworked my planning system since I started the experiment so I can now work in a more balanced way.

In any case the whole point of experimental design is to overcome those sources of variability that you can't control by taking large samples and randomisation.  I will be on this study for about three months so in that time any imbalances will hopefully cancel each other out.  So I am restarting the study today.  Wish me luck!