#27 - Managing, or Being Managed?

Subscribers, Sleep, Savings

Welcome to this week’s edition of Tuesday’s Rule. A weekly breakdown of a life rule that I’ve collected and find to be useful or interesting

Over the last couple of months, my follower and subscriber count on Substack has grown. It’s still very modest, but an increase of around 33% in a few weeks gave me a sustained dopamine release and a motivation boost for my latest three posts, the miniseries on re-reading books.

Reflecting on that, the subsequent slowdown and how I’ve felt since have inspired this week’s rule. One I’d initially noted down a long time ago…

What Gets Measured, Gets Managed

Any management or self-improvement nerd like me will know this rule comes from one of the most famous thinkers of all time, Peter Drucker, the guru who wrote “The Effective Executive”, published in 1966.

In a business context - for which Drucker was typically writing - understanding customer experience, profit and margins is key to understanding performance. How can these things be managed and ultimately improved if they aren't measured? This is why businesses have KPIs, targets, budgets, and countless other metrics. Thinking that something can be improved without measuring and tracking it is unwise. 

In our own lives, this also holds. For those of us focused on health and fitness, knowing our stats - whether it’s our 5km run time, our max bench press, or resting heart rate - is a way to understand where our fitness is and the direction it is heading. At a more basic level, if one is looking to lose or gain weight, a sensible starting point is knowing how much you weigh and keeping an eye on it to assess the success or otherwise of your diet or exercise regime.

Measuring and monitoring many aspects of our lives has become significantly easier. I wear both a Garmin watch and an Ultrahuman ring which gives me a menu of insight about how I’ve slept, how much I’ve moved and my ‘fitness age’. (My Garmin thinks I’m 26 😎).

These are largely welcome insights. I enjoy knowing how I’m progressing with my training and fitness, particularly if I’m training for an event.

The culture of ‘tracking’ has found its way into other aspects of life.

The most obvious one is social media and the impact that’s had on how we determine our success and our social standing. It’s easy to see how this would be unhealthy - tying our sense of self-worth to a number on a screen. I have recently taken myself off of most platforms, but even when I post professionally on LinkedIn, I tend to obsess over how many people have liked or supported what I say.

I also mentioned my Substack subscriber count…

The subtitle of this post is Subscribers, Sleep & Savings.

Not just an alliteration, these are important aspects of my life that I track and measure. I’ve developed an interesting relationship with each of these. I’ve put each - and how I measure, track and manage them - under the spotlight to see if there are any themes to be drawn around where tracking is helpful and where it might become a hindrance…

Subscribers

As mentioned at the top, my followers and subscriber counts recently popped in a way they hadn’t done in the past two years of writing on Substack.

It felt nice.

It felt like I was finally being rewarded for the consistency I’ve maintained this year, and perhaps I was beginning to generate some momentum. This momentum, if sustained, could maybe lead to the exponential growth that all the successful newsletters I follow often proclaim.

It felt nice until I wrote #TR25, which became my “worst” performing post ever, measured by % opened.

I followed that up with #26, which saw my follower count drop back a little bit.

Damn.

Had I changed my approach? Had I written differently or less interestingly? Did I make a mistake with the title, making it less appealing for people to open? Had I become overly focused on increasing my follower count and lost sight of my authentic self?

Either way, hardly anyone opened #25.

I tried not to care. Did I care? I cared a bit.

But as I reflected, the funny thing is, I probably enjoyed writing #TR25 (25 rules from the most value-packed book I own) more than I have lots of others recently. I was probably reminded more of the fun rules I’d collected doing that one than any other previous post. I love that book, and I loved spending time methodically going through it to whittle down the most relevant 25 takeaways.

Despite the mixed results and apparent flaws, I continue to track all my stats after posting and use that data to determine whether the post is 'good' or not… 🤔

Sleep

When I wake up in the morning these days and my partner asks, “How’d you sleep?”, I don’t try and recall what time I got into bed, fell asleep, or how I’m feeling.

Instead, I look at my watch or phone and check my data.

“Hmm, body battery only got to 78%, and I got less than an hour of REM”.

I barely know what REM means, but it’s become my guide for how I slept the night before.

It’s a great feeling to wake up and feel refreshed, only to look and see that you did, indeed nail a perfect sleep score. But it’s happened more than once where I’ve woken up feeling fine, only for my watch to tell me that I didn’t get any deep sleep or enough “effective recovery”. Naturally, instead of getting up and going to the gym, I roll over and get an extra hour’s sleep that I so clearly need.

Tracking health and particularly sleep has become big business and options are abundant. Oura, Whoop, Eight Sleep, even the basic Health section on your iPhone will tell you how you’ve slept (as long as you keep your phone in the room and pick it up first thing in the morning…) With new entrants coming to the market all the time it’s a growth market and the technology is still relatively nascent. For me, the most exciting part of having these devices is seeing how they progress. What will my smart ring be able to track for me when I’m 80-odd?

At its most helpful, tracking sleep can be an integral part of my routine. The data has its benefits, providing insights into patterns and helping me make informed decisions about my sleep habits. Yet, I also wonder if sometimes I rely too heavily on these numbers, letting them dictate how I feel rather than the traditional method of simply listening to my body.

Savings

I was never good with money.

My bank account was a bucket with a hole in it. No matter how much I filled it up, it would be empty at the end of the month.

Only when I got serious about tracking my savings and investments properly, with a nice, aesthetic spreadsheet, did I start to make any progress. Something about seeing the graphs and numbers in a logical, neat format, and the feeling of that number growing month on month was what it took for me to get serious about managing my cash. It looked professional, and so I felt professional.

In his recent book, The Algebra of Wealth, Scott Galloway lays out the simple logic for determining whether someone is rich. “Rich is having a passive income higher than your burn”, he says. Scott also advocates for “having a number” and sticking to that number once it’s reached.

As with most things he says, this sounds legit. Let’s suppose we buy into this definition of being rich and we determine that, we too, want to be rich.

How could we possibly achieve that without understanding our passive income and burn rate, before monitoring our spending to make sure the ratio is falling on the right side?

Conclusion

We live in a world where data and insights are abundant.

It has its place. Using it to your advantage can have significant benefits, whether it’s managing money or managing your weight or fitness progress, there are some things which just cannot be achieved without a good sense of where you’re at, and where you’re headed.

But it can become a problem.

It becomes a problem when instead of managing, you are the one being managed.

It's good to track sleep and understand the broad trends and impact of various actions on the quality of recovery (turns out alcohol is a bit of a shocker here). But when this leads to decisions not founded in genuine understanding or intentionality, it's gone too far.

Even if we agree that you will unlikely become financially savvy without tracking your money, even this can be taken too far. Monitoring every decision and living through spreadsheets risks making life less fun.

The final concluding point, and perhaps the most important one, is that not everything that matters can be measured. 

I have grown so fond of writing TR every week. I have come to greatly appreciate how it crystallizes and improves my thinking and holds me accountable for producing something of 'value' every week, even if I'm busy and don't feel like it. These are benefits that I couldn't measure with a number or a chart. Even if I had only one or two followers (hi Mum and Dad 👋🏻), those benefits would still exist; I just wouldn't be able to see them on my Dashboard.

I am a big tracker. I obsess over having good data and insight in my personal and professional life. But I know I'm guilty of prioritising observable, trackable metrics over and above ones that cannot be easily measured.

Observable metrics vs. hidden metrics and where we focus our energy is a powerful thought experiment. Where are we prioritising observable ones like follower count or max deadlift above hidden ones like satisfaction, fulfilment, and our sense of general well-being? It's worth spending some time thinking about these to make sure you are managing the abundance of data you have and it isn't managing you. 

I'll keep writing even if my open rate, followers and subscriber numbers stall and decline. But even so… it's always nice to welcome a new subscriber or two :)

See you next week ✌🏻❤️