Day Five: Metrics

Yesterday I described a momentary setback in my month of discipline: My self-control wavered causing my productivity to dwindle. All in all though, I have been successful thus far, or at least I believe I have been; I feel like I'm more aware of what I should be doing and how to accomplish it. But how can I change a subjective feeling of increased self-discipline into a quantitative measurement so that I have evidence to back up this belief?

I think a straightforward way to do this is to establish a system of metrics; I  can record when/if certain events happen in hopes that this record can be analyzed to reflect increasing or decreasing self-discipline. This sounds a bit mysterious, but it actually is very simply illustrated by an example: If not drinking requires self control, then by keeping track of how much I drink I can indirectly estimate my level of self-discipline.

The trick is to establish metrics that are a good proxy for the directly immeasurable quantity. In contrast, sometimes employers establish bad metrics that can be exploited to reflect exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to; for example, a metric based on 'lines of code' that a single computer programmer writes may indirectly encourage coders to be extremely verbose and not reuse common code. While the metric is intended to measure the productivity of programmers, it may instead reward bad programmers and lead to worse code and lost money for the company.

I've hacked up a simple database that will allow me to keep a record of salient events; but what should these events be? The amount I drink (alcoholic), my weight (when I weigh in at the gym), how often I excercise, the amount of sleep I get, and whether I set aside time each day for tidying up or learning a new word in a foreign toungue, are the current candidates. As a whole, I think that recording these events will give me a holistic sense of my self-discipline. They are indeed hard to exploit, because each of them represents something I may be tempted to skip, and thus requires controlling my impulses and actively delaying gratification.

Another measure of self-discipline, which I failed for the first time in the short history of this blog yesterday, is whether each day I write a post. Because it requires time and effort, when I am tired it is easy to put such a task off; it too can be added to the list of metrics. I am excited to begin collecting data, which gives my self-control a much needed boost after yesterday's unfortunate slump.