Last week, Wells Fargo laid off many of its remote employees.
These employees were found to have been “simulating keyboard activity” (using programs/devices that automatically type keys or wiggle the mouse when they were not at their computer).
why?
Because these employees were rated as follows:
It’s not determined by the number of customers you acquire or the number of relationships you build, but by the number of hours you spend active on your computer.
So that’s exactly what the employees gave them.
Remember, this is the same bank that in 2017 told employees to “sign up as many customers as possible for additional banking services.”
result?
The fraudulent use of credit cards, savings and brokerage accounts by millions of unwitting customers resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and discredited Wells Fargo.
Why did these two ludicrous errors of judgement occur?
Bloomberg Matt Levin Well said:
The two basic principles of management, regulation, and life are:
- What you measure is what you get.
- What you measure gets gamified.
In fact, it’s just one principle: what you measure, you get, but only exactly what you measure, with no guarantee that you’ll get something more generally good than you thought you were roughly measuring.
If you want hardworking workers and measure their working hours, you will have many workers surfing the Internet until late at night.
I stumbled across this story last week and immediately thought about how this very motivation and unexpected outcome might play out in our everyday lives.
Download Duolingo to learn to speak Months later, we’re checking in every day, desperately trying to maintain our daily streak without getting yelled at by an owl… and all we can say is, “I found a blue ostrich in the library.”
We lie in bed, flailing our arms over our heads like mad. FitBit tells me I need 500 more steps to reach 10,000 for the day.The History of the 10,000 Step Rule by the way…)
I once meditated every day for six months. To keep track of my meditations in Headspace, I would sometimes just open the app and play the meditation, and it would record it. I wasn’t meditating…Why I downloaded this app.
We tell ourselves, “I want to read more.” But we do keep track of how many books we read. This encourages us to read faster (without memorizing anything) instead of tackling bigger challenges. War and Peace or Reread Read your favorite books for more lessons.
Why do we want to read more? To learn something or to have fun! It doesn’t matter how many books or which books they are.:
Social media started as a way to connect with friends. Social media is big business these days. only It’s a marketing tool for many creators. Social media has now become an angry hellscape as these companies track “time on app” and “attention.”
The content that gets the most attention rises to the top: incitement-inducing, factually incorrect, awful content designed to incite anger and fear. Even most of my favorite wellness creators these days spend their time making reaction videos to the most vile misinformation about wellness, because that’s the only kind of content that gets attention.
(Many people The dark forest of the internet!).
All of this weaves a fascinating tapestry of how the human brain works and how extraordinary our ability to take measurements and learn is. Wrong Lessons to learn from these indicators!
What are you measuring?
Most people go to NerdFitness.com to “lose weight.”
It’s the only metric that everyone is used to tracking. Every ad tells you how to lose weight quickly. People look at the number on the scale and let that number determine how they feel about themselves that day.
This is the wrong metric to focus on exclusively.
What we really want isn’t to “lose weight” — what we want is to lose fat while maintaining (or gaining) muscle.
If weight loss is your only goal, strict calorie restriction and endless cardio exercise may bring the number down, but without changing your relationship with food and not getting enough of the right macro- and micronutrients, you’ll feel lethargic, hungry, miserable, and prone to overeating whenever life gets in the way.
If you eat enough protein and strength train while in a calorie deficit, you can actually lose weight. Slower This will help you lose fat while still maintaining muscle mass, rather than simply starving yourself and doing hours of cardio.
The scale is Evaluate your progress:
In the end, the number on the scale Fluctuates daily:
- Suppose you went out to dinner last night.
- Did I eat too much salt yesterday?
- If you are carrying excess fluid.
- If you’re on your period.
- There are many reasons.
So, once you know that what you choose to track is important, how can you leverage this to your advantage?
What to track, what not to track
Remember, what gets measured gets improved, so be smart about what you track.
Ask yourself, “What do I really want to happen? Is this the right metric for that goal?”
- Eat healthier: Track your protein intake The amount and number of fruits and vegetables you eat each day. Make these the first two things you eat at every meal and your weight will start to change without you even realizing it.
- “Beach Body“? Okay. Build muscleLog your training and write down exactly how many sets and repetitions you did. Then do one more next time. What’s your goal? Win with progressive overload! Get stronger and
- Want to read more? Tracking “books read” will force you to choose short books or speed read them, so instead track “time spent reading.” This can include audiobooks or rereading old books. Like a river, not a to-do list!
Finally, there are a lot of things you don’t need to track, or things you should be careful about when tracking.
There is an entire community of biohackers that prioritizes tracking every last detail across a wide range of metrics, many of which may be inconsequential or even negative.
The questions we are frequently asked are:
If you have diabetes, you don’t need to wear a continuous glucose monitor unless your doctor tells you to. It’s completely normal for your blood sugar to spike temporarily after eating.
(This podcast My friend, Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, explains nicely why you don’t need a blood glucose monitor unless you have diabetes:
Here are some things I previously tracked but abandoned:
Previously, I used to track my sleep well using my Oura ring and AppleWatch, but I would get anxious in the middle of the night, worried that I was messing up my “sleep score.” This was negatively impacting the very activity I was trying to improve through tracking. These days, I worry less about tracking “good sleep” and just try to get about 8 hours in bed, whether I’m asleep or not.
And as for the larger philosophical questions of life,
Be aware that social media is distorting the scorecard you are using to track your progress in life. It is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “I work hard to earn money so I can spend it on things I don’t need to impress people I don’t like.” Success in life is not measured by the size of your house, the value of your car, or the balance in your bank account.
To sum it all up:
When it comes to personal development and health promotion, the key is to ask yourself, “What am I trying to optimize? actually Please help me to get results Really want?”
That way you can determine if you are playing with the right scorecard and focusing on the right metrics.
Let us know what you think: What metrics did you previously prioritize that you no longer track? And what are some important metrics that you recently decided to prioritize?
Reply to this and let me know!
-Steve
