Goal Tracking Gone Wrong: Be Careful What You Measure
Tracking our goals and habits is something we are used to doing as athletes. Cyclists with a goal of getting faster look at hours trained and miles ridden as benchmarks or milestones on our way to our bigger goals. If you’re trying to lose weight, you may be tracking calories and the number on the scale. Maybe you’re tracking how much extra money you could make this month as part of your savings plan.
Measuring things are good. They help keep us focused and analyze if we are moving in the right direction. But sometimes we can have an unhealthy relationship with numbers. We can get obsessed with the numbers themselves for the wrong reasons- maybe you should have trained less this week because you’re tired but you felt like you had to hit your hours because you’re measuring it. I have definitely fallen into this trap. Maybe you were initially posting more to social media because you wanted to build community but now you’re too fixated on the number of likes. I got stuck there a few years ago as well.
Goodhart’s Law states – “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
What does this mean? It means that you might sacrifice quality of the thing you’re measuring to attain a number. You want to train a certain number of hours per week, but what if the quality of training declines and you get more and more fatigued? While I love Strava, I get sucked into wanting my moving time or elevation to look a certain way… and not even because of other people seeing it. It's because I want to see it. You want more likes on social media, but you really don’t have a lot of control over that so you end up feeling bad about yourself or exiting a platform (when really the initial intent was to connect with others and have fun). I feel bad about myself ALL the time on social media. I try to create posts that are helpful and especially lately, my engagement is nowhere near it used to be. Maybe you’re trying to attain a certain grade on a test, but being obsessed with the grade degrades the learning process (how many times have you forgotten everything the day after an exam?). One last example is you want to have podium race results, but you choose less challenging races that don’t help you improve as an athlete so you can get the podium result.
We should be measuring the habits and commitment to the process, not measuring the outcome. Measurement IS useful, but only when it is guiding you and adding context to a larger picture. Measurement is helpful when it emphasizes a quality process to the thing you are measuring. Having a multi-faceted process that isn’t reliant on just one thing can also improve results. For good training, you need to sleep well, eat well, train well, and recover well. It’s not just about riding a certain number of hours. I liked this article about Goodhart’s Law if you want to go deeper.