You measure burndown, velocity, and budget for the project. Here is how to turn that same instinct on yourself, and the four metrics actually worth tracking.
Quantified-Self
9 posts
Task-switching feels productive and costs you dearly. Here is why attention residue makes it expensive, and a simple way to measure your own switching tax.
Teams pause every two weeks to ask what worked and what did not. You can run the same ritual on yourself, alone, in twenty minutes a week.
You are not bad at estimating because you are careless. You are bad at it because your brain runs a story that quietly deletes everything that could go wrong.
Hours are identical; energy is not. Learn to read your ultradian rhythms and spend your peaks on the work that actually matters.
A goal is a feeling until you can see whether you are ahead or behind. A burndown chart turns that feeling into a line you cannot argue with.
Four knobs on a wooden box grade the four people living inside me each night, and the real payoff is the ten minutes my son and I spend comparing ours.
Five honest minutes and a blank page turn the 2am anxious loop into a sentence you can finally look at, and that is only where the payoff starts.
I would have sworn I slept fine and ate reasonably, until I wrote the numbers down and they flatly disagreed with everything I believed about myself.