Success metrics

Arguably the single most important part of any project that everyone skips is defining what makes a project successful.

The Traps to Avoid

Doing so focuses the project and, more importantly, will help you ignore three big traps:

  • Taking on other people’s definitions of success.
  • Never finishing.
  • Grabbing onto tantalizing data that don’t actually support your goals.

Other People’s Ideas of Success

Often–always, actually-–when working on a project people will offer opinions and ideas on what you should do with it. This is human nature and is a lovely thing. If you’re not sure in what you want though, well, it’s easy to take on their thoughts as your own. Feedback is good, taking it all in means that you’re not secure in why you’re doing what you’re doing.

A lot of what people will suggest means success is going to have to do with capitalism. Always remember that you are not required to monetize your joy.

Never Finishing

Finishing anything is hard. It’s so hard.

The last 10% of even the best scoped projects is always 1000% of the work. Nothing will kill your momentum during that difficult phase more than not knowing what you’re actually shooting for.

You get lost, flail about for a bit, and put it down forever. It’ll make you feel guilty for a long time too whenever you think about it.

Tantalizing Data

Social Media figured out years ago that people like having numbers attached to their posts. Engagement metrics are, frankly, super fun because it’s a nice dopamine hit to see strangers interact with your posts! My guess is that with any interrogation though you’ll find that your reasons for posting are not to see analytics numbers tick up.

You’re probably, at a minimum, more interested in a specific audience liking and retweeting your work. Or, the actual reason you’re posting on social media might be to sell your project, generate commissions, share it with a group, keep a diary for yourself, OR any number of totally valid reasons to use social media.

A large number of favs, shares, and/or retweets is rarely going to be your project’s actual goal. If it is, you can go and buy those likes and retweets from many numerous shady websites with a minimum amount of fuss.

A Personal Example

To personalize this: the primary goal of the posts on this blog are to help me organize my thoughts and to reference them later on. A secondary goal is to share posts with my social circles. A tertiary goal is for random folks on the internet to find the posts when they’re looking for specific information.

This post was written as a reminder to myself to avoid mistakes I’ve made in the past. I’ve walked directly into all of the three traps above and will likely continue to do so. If anyone else reads this post hopefully they’ll be able to use it as ammunition against me the next time I dive in headfirst into a project without a goal.

If my primary goal was to achieve some sort of Elite Blogger Status I’d have to do things a lot differently. Probably there would be no cryptic posts about goal setting! Not going after that particular goal frees me up do what I actually want with this little corner of the internet and not obsess too much over analytics numbers.

The Temptation of Analytics

This post started as a tootstorm

Computers excel at logging statistics. The upshot is that it makes it trivial (for certain values of “trivial”) to get numbers about how many people are accessing your projects and products and blog posts. This is, on the whole, considered a good thing; however, I’m not so sure it is.

Recently, whenever I start a project I’ve been trying to define why I’m doing the project and what are my measures for success. That makes me sound like the world’s bro-iest business guy, but hear me out! I do this because I’ve found that if I don’t I’ll default to The Numbers. And, friends, numbers are pernicious when trusted without skepticism. Measuring the “success” of a project based on charts without other goals in mind leads to poor decision-making. You quickly forget why you started your thing in the first place. Worst of all, if you’re not disciplined the numbers can leads you down the path of “monetization!” even if that was never the primary intent.

I recently started a podcast with a close friend and I’m intentionally not looking at analytics for at least 10 episodes (although it’s so tempting!). When we talked about our goals “maximizing the listenership number” didn’t even come up in the original list.

It’s been freeing not chasing metrics and instead focusing on my actual goals, which are:

  • An excuse to regularly talk with my cohost, Andy!
  • Formalize our conversations around tabletop gaming
  • Gain real world experience with podcast production and audio editing
  • Secretly invent a way to talk to interesting people!

When it comes time to glance at the analytics my hope is that it’ll be because there’s a specific question about a goal that statistics can help answer. Everything else is noise.

This is a tangential quotation, but one that I think is worth sharing from Molly Conway’s The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies into Hustles:

“You don’t have to monetize your joy.”

Don’t let statistics lead you directly into that trap. Never let a number without an attached goal shape why you do something.