Metric Formulas and The Tyranny of Over-Optimization

How to embrace a less narrow definition of success

2025 materialized, and on New Year's Day, I realized I had become a victim of our own creation. Reflect has had the ability to set custom goals since last September. However, in early December, we added a feature that would allow you to view your daily progress towards those goals when recording your metrics. I decided to put this to the test, and set a goal of working on Reflect for 2 hours or more every day. It worked. The feedback loop was so effective I quickly realized that I was far exceeding my goal of 2 hours most days, to the exclusion of other priorities in life. I was putting off journaling, chores, weekly review time, and other obligations and priorities in favor of spending more time working. It was too tempting to maintain the streak of green displayed in the the bar showing my recent daily goal progress.

I was falling prey to some of the issues highlighted in The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller:

Accountability ought to mean being held responsible for one’s actions. But by a sort of linguistic sleight of hand, accountability has come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measurement, as if only that which can be counted really counts.

He describes a phenomenon known as metric fixation, the first characteristic of which is

the belief that it is possible and desirable to replace judgment, acquired by personal experience and talent, with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardized data (metrics)

Something had to change. The irony of the situation is that my way out of this dilemma was to develop a new feature in Reflect, which would require me to spend even more time writing code. But I had a vision in mind. I think this where many goal setting apps fail, they don't allow you to optimize for whatever balance means to you. I wanted to keep all the positive aspects of the goal setting feature, but tweak it slightly to prevent over-optimizing for one specific metric when I actually have a wide range of priorities in life.

This is why I started developing Metric Formulas. I wanted to be able to set a combined goal for a metric that was a combination of multiple productive ways I spend my time. Working on Reflect, journaling, performing a weekly/daily review of my to do list and obligations, spending time studying jiu jitsu. These can be combined with a simple formula which I can update if my priorities change in the future.

Productive Time = SUM(Reflect Work, Journaling, Review, BJJ Study)

Now, I don't feel like spending time on any single one of these would detract from one of my goals. This is my way of fighting back against a narrow definition of success.