Related: Career Development & Business MOC
the leading indicator is your best friend
Success metrics are measurements of specific behaviors which in turn lead to more success in a discipline
There can be multiple success metrics, all with variable degrees of control. To figure out what exactly you should focus your time on, you need to identify between the lagging indicator vs the leading indicator
Clean Code uses science researchers as the example. How do you measure success as a researcher? It’s research citations - because more research citations lead to more visibility, credibility, and opportunity.
Increasing research citations is not something you can actively do. It’s a lagging indicator, meaning is a result that’s based on previous actions, and not an action itself.
So you need to find the leading indicator, the metric (and linked behavior) that can predict the lagging indicator. If you do more of (leading indicator), then the (lagging indicator) will improve.
For researchers, writing high quality researcher papers and publishing them in high quality journals will more than likely result in more citations. But we’re not done with identifying metrics just yet!
the success metric exercise
There’s rarely 1 task that you should do and 1 task that you shouldn’t do to push the needle closer to your goal. Think of the behaviors and indicators as a spectrum from lagging to leading.
If you plot the indicators on the spectrum, from lagging (left) to leading (right), then it’ll look something like this
| lagging ⇐- | ------------------------ | -------------------------- | -----⇒ leading |
|---|---|---|---|
| number of citations | number of high quality papers written | number of total words written in your life | number of words written today |
Focus on the thing that matters the most
- Figure out what items you spend time on at work
- plot them on the spectrum
- be lazy about all the items on the list except the most important one
- readily drop unimportant things, and used saved time to put towards the leading indicator