Measuring Everything Except What Matters

There is a measurement you used to take. I do not know its name because it was private. Maybe it was the number of evenings you were genuinely present with someone you love. Maybe it was the frequency with which the work still surprised you with something worth caring about. Maybe it was simply the count of days in a month when you felt, however briefly, like yourself.

You stopped taking that measurement sometime after the other measurements got loud.

I am not asking you to abandon the scorecards entirely. I am a physician. I believe in data. I believe in numbers. What I am asking is that you find the one measurement that has been silent and reinstate it. Not as a new performance target. As a return. As the thing that tells you the truth about whether the other numbers are adding up to anything that matters.

The metric you stopped keeping is the one the rest of them were supposed to be serving.

— Job