[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What metrics do you pay attention to?
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Ask HN: What metrics do you pay attention to?
People love their metrics. Whether it's how many steps they made in
a day, or their karma score on Hackernews, etc But social media
metrics aside: what other metrics do you pay attention to in your
daily life? One obvious one for many people would be their bottom
line / profit margin. But that aside, what numbers do you pay
attention to each day?
Author : DerekBickerton
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-11-11 13:15 UTC (1 days ago)
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| I'm an indie game developer on Steam and one of the most
| important business metrics for me is Wishlist Count. When I have
| a game coming up to release I can see what the level of interest
| is for it, and roughly how that will convert to sales. When a
| game is released that you have on your wishlist, Steam emails you
| about it, so it's a pretty valuable thing to have as a developer.
|
| It's not a metric with 100% certainty, but if you tell me you
| have 1000 wishlisters, or 10,000, or 100,000 I can tell you
| roughly the range of sales that gets you.
| mulmen wrote:
| What do you do with this information? Do you create multiple
| MVP games and then complete development based on wish list
| metrics?
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| I mostly use it to say "oh good, there will probably (with a
| certain % likelihood) be x,000 people who will buy the game
| within the first week.
|
| I know publishers like Playway do exactly what you describe
| with all of their <insert niche job here> Simulator series of
| games, but it's not my thing. I use my wishlist counts to
| check I'm on the right track, to keep encouraged when
| development feels like a grind, to help justify putting a
| certain amount of $$ towards its development. If I was really
| struggling to get wishlists I would seriously consider
| changing the game's presentation substantially, or changing
| to work to something else, but I've not yet been in that
| situation. But in that case it would be a pretty decent
| signal that something about how the game looks isn't chiming
| with potential customers.
|
| There are other useful metrics too, how many YouTube views
| did the announcement trailer get? Did it get posted to reddit
| and do okay there? How many people have joined the Discord?
| And so on and on, so it's not all one thing.
|
| Given the not-perfect-but-pretty-good correlation between
| number-of-wishlists to number-of-first-year-sales it's a
| helpful number to help budget/forecast my business.
| lardolan wrote:
| I can imagine many points where this kind of signals will
| lead to distorted results. (e.g. video goes viral because
| of other thing than your game). Do you have also experience
| when it went wrong? How did you handled it?
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| If a video gets lots of views because of some other
| signal that isn't "this looks like a fun game", it's not
| too difficult to see that? The comments on YouTube or
| Reddit will be: 'look at this bug', or 'this game is
| ripping off X', or some culture war thing. I can think of
| a examples in the last couple of years of each those.
|
| But, it's harder to imagine how Steam wishlist counts
| lead to _totally_ distorted accounts. Unless someone is
| botting your Steam store page and the wishlisters don 't
| exist, they're all still potential customers, and 5,000
| wishlisters means something and 50,000 wishlisters means
| something.
|
| There's lots of conversation about 'quality' of Steam
| wishlisters between developers. For example, Steam Fest
| is an event that Steam runs every now and then with game
| demos and there's very prominent 'wishlist this game'
| buttons. It's generally accepted that these wishlisters
| are 'worth less' than if they come from YouTube or
| PCGamer or even other sources upon Steam. So if 90% of
| your wishlist count comes through Steam Fests, yeah, you
| probably do have a distorted metric to work with. But no,
| I haven't experienced this myself.
| muzani wrote:
| I buy most of the games on my wishlist. In fact, I probably
| wouldn't buy a game without wishlisting it first. Steam does
| sales constantly so it's a matter of when I'm in the mood for
| it and it's at the right price.
|
| But by now I'm more of a collector than a player, because
| playing games literally costs more than buying them.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Personally? None, I have already to many of those at work. Single
| exception: mpg for my 1982 Range Rover V8, because of reasons.
|
| Professionally? Right now not enough of those needed and to much
| of pointless ones. I try to get people to use the proper KPIs for
| what they are doing so, it seems to be quite an uphill battle.
| Because who really cares _when_ POs are placed as long as they
| are delivered on time (which nobody is monitoring right now...)?
| dominotw wrote:
| number of steps on apple health
|
| pomodoro count
| whelton wrote:
| Here are a handful of personal ones for me:
|
| - Health & Well-being: Step count (Apple Watch). Weight (Withings
| Scale). Meditation minutes. Sleep (Whoop). First sunlight
| exposure (circadian entrainment). Lunch and dinner times
| (circadian entrainment). Water consumption.
|
| - Work: Time spent on Conjure. Time spent on client work.
|
| - Self Development: Books read. Time spent reading. Time spent
| consuming inspiring material (mindset).
|
| I mostly track them manually or automatically in Conjure[1]
| (disclaimer I'm building it) and then link them to Habits and
| Objectives in it.
|
| I also tend to add and remove different measures/metrics at
| different times based on what is going on in my life, or pause
| certain ones for a while if I'm burnt out and need less overhead
| in my day-to-day.
|
| [1] https://conjure.so/
| lambic wrote:
| >= 25km walked on Pokemon Go / week
|
| <= $70(summer)/$100(winter) Electricity consumption / quarter
|
| >= 1 book chapter / day
|
| >= 1 time leaving the apartment / day
|
| income - expenses > 0
| DrNuke wrote:
| - Happiness time: how long I can stay happy (or content, at
| least) through a single day.
|
| Before this turns rough, philosophical or greedy... it is just
| related to pretty basic fulfillment of a pretty modest life.
| mindvirus wrote:
| In no particular order:
|
| Number of steps (10k/day goal)
|
| Number of cups of coffee (going for the high score here)
|
| Bedtime/wake up time (need 7 hrs)
|
| Time spent focused on kids (want an hour of dedicated time with
| them on weekends, not including meals and taking them to/from
| school).
|
| Portfolio balance (working toward escape velocity).
|
| Hours studying language (targeting 1 hr/day).
|
| Alcoholic drinks per day/week (try to stay under 2/day, 4/week).
| newtwilly wrote:
| Does high score cups of coffee seem to work out well for you?
| mindvirus wrote:
| Hah, seems ok. Really I have 2-3 cups a day. I tried stopping
| for a month once and really didn't feel great the whole time.
| davidw wrote:
| The weather.
| reaperducer wrote:
| - Local COVID positivity rate
|
| - Total value of my investments and savings
|
| - Time spent sleeping
|
| At this time, there is very little else in my life that requires
| me to change my routine.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I track more than a dozen quantities related to my daily
| activities, included alcohol/junk food consumption, exercise,
| weight training numbers, finance info (net worth/spending), book
| notes, project commitments, TODO list, language learning, and so
| on.
|
| I built a simple web framework that makes it very easy to add new
| mini-webapps (I call them WebWidgets). It turns out it is very
| easy to build simple webapps if the data size is modest, there is
| a small number of users, and you can assume the users have newish
| browsers. I create dynamic pages without any frontend libraries
| like React, just by composing HTML strings in Javascript and
| slapping them into div/span tags. Works like a charm.
|
| For many years this was only a personal project, but I'm slowly
| opening the system up for use by other people. I offer free
| accounts and tech support for early adopters, and I will even
| code up a few widgets for you if you're interested. Check it out:
|
| https://webwidgets.io/
| osigurdson wrote:
| Strava training calendar/log. Strava freshness and fitness
| (though I know it is mostly bogus).
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| Personal:
|
| - Tracking hours / quality of sleep (with the SleepCycle app)
|
| - Weights I lift in compound exercises like bench press or
| deadlift (pen + paper). It's motivating to see progress.
|
| - General daily well being on a scale from 1-10 (google doc).
| This is divided into my perceived productivity and mood. I seem
| to be quite erratic with tracking this recently though - I might
| build a simple app with reminders to help me. The scores I
| collect can be easily looked up in relation with my other notes
| (todo lists, basic journal etc.) to find what affects me the
| most.
|
| - Budgeting (revolut)
|
| Business:
|
| Background - I'm working on an app to make online meetings more
| fun. At the core I have rooms where guests can hang out and
| engage in different activities. The metrics I focus most for now
| are:
|
| - Monthly unique guests that join any kind of room as my guiding
| metric.
|
| - Currently experimenting with total aggregated human time spent
| in the rooms daily / weekly / monthly. This seems to be a better
| metric because in contrast with a plain MAU it also indicates
| engagement and general impact (would love some feedback on that -
| for more context on the app: https://flat.social).
|
| - Conversion rates from different call to actions spread across
| various subpages.
|
| - Core user journey funnels to see where new users get stuck so I
| can clean up any confusing areas of the app out (copy, buttons,
| navigation etc.)
| elil17 wrote:
| I would love a simple well being tracker. If you made that app
| would absolutely pay for it.
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| I'm bookmarking your comment for the future beta testing :)
| davereid wrote:
| I've always used Daylio for mood tracking. You may find it
| useful :) https://daylio.net/
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| I have a personal gripe with SleepCycle after they switched to
| a subscription model ($52/y) and left all their original fully-
| paid customers in the dirt.
| mbesto wrote:
| Love this question!
|
| For me personally:
|
| - Whoop Recovery % / Cals burned
|
| - Number of hours working out per week
|
| - Calories per day (not tracked well)
|
| - Monthly business revenue / number of projects completed
|
| - Net worth
| AnonHP wrote:
| I use an Apple Watch and the Health app on the iPhone to track
| health related metrics.
|
| Every morning, I check and track:
|
| * Sleep duration
|
| * Blood pressure
|
| * Body weight (and BMI)
|
| Everyday I track:
|
| * Water intake
|
| * Exercise duration, active calories burned and "stand hours"
| (these are the rings to close on Fitness on Apple Watch/iPhone)
|
| I also take a look at the following, though not every single day:
|
| * Heart rate variability (HRV)
|
| * Two-lead ECG measurement
|
| * Resting heart rate
|
| I don't use the trends feature in the Health app. It doesn't seem
| that prominent or useful.
| david_allison wrote:
| - GitHub contributions - Aim for at least one per day. If not,
| then I should have a reason for it.
|
| - Weight (MyFitnessPal) - on a cut right now, and I'll log
| progress when it decreases
|
| - Time in VR/calories burned (aiming for 40 mins/250 cals
| minimum, but typically do significantly more)
|
| - COVID - I'm high risk for a while, so I do a daily LFD
|
| - Donations received on Open Collective
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| Lately, I've been spending a lot of time reviewing my metrics,
| both personal and professional. I realized that many of the
| metrics fell into the category of lag measures (e.g. pounds lost
| per month). Now, I'm trying to pepper my goals with more lead
| measures (e.g. number of times I hit the gym per week), wanting a
| mix of both types of metrics.
|
| Same applies for running my business. Instead of focusing all my
| efforts on revenue, I'm keeping a close eye on metrics in my
| control (e.g. number of people I touched base with this week)
| buybackoff wrote:
| Garmin Watch body battery. Was skeptical initially, but am
| surprised how well it works. It's a composite of sleep quality
| for gains (should recharge daily above 80 ideally) and physical
| stress, measured by heart rate variation, for losses.
|
| Quasi-related to the body battery is minimal heart rate while
| sleeping (the watches automatic "resting" number is often higher,
| so I look at the chart). Relative to 2-week moving average it's a
| leading indicator of illness. I have nice charts for my recent
| covid and common cold, 1-2 days before the symptoms I could see
| unexplained (e.g. no drinks) higher levels. In absolute terms it
| correlates with endurance training and recovery after long
| training sessions (it goes lower with training in general, after
| a long session it is higher for 1-3 days, when it's back to low
| level it's full recovery, good time for further training).
|
| Both help in simple decisions such as go to bed earlier, training
| intensity, whether evening coding session could be productive or
| better watch a movie, etc.
|
| As a side note, it's funny how alcohol affects both metrics -
| same as illness + very low battery the next day. The metrics make
| me think twice and when both are bad it's better to skip drinking
| even if the context/schedule and subjective feelings are OK for
| it.
| Sn0wCoder wrote:
| Also pay close attention to the Garmin body battery. When I
| first got it was like I don't need a device to tell me if I got
| a good night sleep, but I was wrong. The biggest thing is
| alcohol, drink around noon golden. Drink up to bed time going
| to be at zero when you wake up. Went on vacation and drank
| every day for a week was cruising at zero the whole time. Got
| back first night good sleep 100! Also staying up late and not
| drinking enough water will give the same results. Makes you
| think about drinking more when you got a big day ahead,
| although like I said can game the body by drinking from noon -
| 3 then rehydrating before bed. Cheers!
| buybackoff wrote:
| I was on vacation in my home country during the record
| heatwave this June, friends, drinking... by the metrics it
| was worse than covid :)
| dinkleberg wrote:
| These metrics (except I used a whoop) are what made me stop
| drinking. It was hard to justify it to myself when I could not
| just feel but also see the direct impact it had.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| I've been unable to get my garmin to track my sleep properly.
| It has strange ideas about when I fall asleep or when I wake
| up. Do you have any advice for how to improve that?
| Sn0wCoder wrote:
| Make sure you are not drinking alcohol, avoid stimulates, and
| hydrate. If you are doing all that and still not going to 100
| might be defective. I wear my watch pretty loose and still
| get great results. I thought mine was not working at first
| but turns out was drinking to much coffee and alcohol for my
| body to actually get to 100. Also make sure you are getting
| minimum 8 hours sleep. When you are at zero can take 10 - 12
| to get up to 100 then you will not be starting from zero each
| night.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| I'm not saying the body battery number was inaccurate. I'm
| saying it had sleep times and wakeup times that had nothing
| to do with when I was even in bed.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Not exactly an answer to your question, but I ended up
| getting an Oura ring because of that issue. It's extremely
| accurate.
| buybackoff wrote:
| A tighter, but still comfortable, fit. Also I changed the
| hand on which I wear it overnight. It used to show BS
| sometimes before the change. I think it depends on the bed
| and sleep posture.
|
| I do not care about sleep phases or when the watches think I
| fall asleep, it's approximately correct and that's enough.
| Hours of sleep mean much less than the body battery increase
| overnight.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I came to the same conclusion, but using an Oura ring instead.
| It's good to see 2 different devices and persons, but with the
| same results. It kinda validate that those are valid metrics.
| pc86 wrote:
| I have a whoop and the recovery metric it tracks (which is a
| 0-100 number of what seems to be 5-6 parameters in the current
| version and 8-9 in the upcoming one) is surprisingly good. I
| too was very skeptical of a single-dimension value but even
| when I don't have a "reason" to get tired early in the day it's
| still a good indicator of how the day is going to go.
| graeme wrote:
| I do the same with an apple watch. I use Autosleep, which has a
| morning readiness feature using hrv and waking pulse.
|
| I also track sleep total and sleeping pulse. Long run sleeping
| pulse is a good indicator of my general health. Insufficient
| sleep will kill my energy.
|
| I also weight myself and take weight circumference. Should stay
| stable or trend down.
|
| This takes about 5 min in morning. Time well spent.
| moneywoes wrote:
| I don't currently but I have read that HRV is very important.
| dcardoza wrote:
| What I currently track: - Hours of sleep per day
| - Calories burned per day - Calorie intake per day
| - Caffeine per day (mg) - Financial Portfolio performance
| every few days - Monthly spend on different categories
| (eg. food, housing, misc) - Squat, bench, deadlift numbers
|
| What I want to track: - Water per day -
| Blood levels. I'd love to get bloodwork done very 6months to a
| year? - Books read (mostly so I read more) -
| Blogposts written - Code written? Whether its a personal
| project, random scripts, leetcode puzzles. Helps me realize if
| I'm doing what I want vs. spending my time elsewhere.
|
| Definitely more I want to track. Love seeing everyone else's
| ideas.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Is there a personal utility to reading _more_ arbitrarily, or
| do you have specific titles you 're trying to get through? Do
| you find that these numbers are representative of what you
| actually want, or what you think you _should_ want to spend
| your time on?
|
| What do you spend your time on for fun (not tracked)?
|
| I used to try and read a lot of my Pocket saved articles, but
| now have a different relationship with that. I find that I
| couldn't give two shits about any of the blog posts I've saved,
| and actually that it takes time away from things I'd rather do,
| like stare blankly at a wall or play video games. That's goes
| especially for something I ostensibly should inform myself of
| for a vague sense of self-improvement, but actually most
| knowledge is kind of a hollow pursuit unless I tie it to
| something.
| stagger87 wrote:
| I track water by carrying around a large nalgene. Easy to
| remember to drink 2 full nalgenes than 8 cups of water.
| yehudalouis wrote:
| The number of times that I use nicotine. I'm drawing down from
| constant use, and now reserve it just for a small treat before
| bed. I hope to soon cut nicotine out entirely.
|
| The percentage of the week that I make it to the gym. My goal is
| 4x (M-Th). I like to hit my goal. Aside: if anyone has felt their
| mental health slip or having trouble sleeping - absolute start
| going to the gym. The affect it has had on my life cannot be
| understated.
| city41 wrote:
| I track sleep and exercise with an Oura ring and also track my
| investments. I also try to consume about 64 oz of water per day.
|
| To flip this around, I stopped tracking HN and reddit upvotes and
| really all social media "likes" of any kind. I mostly did this by
| closing all my accounts (except HN and reddit). I also removed
| all analytics from all of my side projects. I have found this has
| shifted my creation process from "what will get me likes?" to
| "what do I really want to make?" and that's been very positive.
| hammock wrote:
| Bedtime.
|
| One rep maxes.
|
| Internal thermometer of the sheet pan meals I make every other
| day.
|
| Podcast revenue.
|
| Amount of dirty laundry in the hamper.
| jonathanbentz wrote:
| Personal:
|
| - Time spent reading daily: my min goal is 30 minutes. - Time
| spent on social media: trying to lower this to as close to 0 as
| possible, currently limiting to about 20 minutes per day. -
| Amount of sleep
|
| Professional:
|
| - Average ranking position for all keyword targets (I'm an
| SEO/digital marketer) - Amount of work hours invested (I'm a
| remoter, so I want to make sure I hit AT LEAST 8). PS - this is
| never a problem LOL.
| moneywoes wrote:
| PS?
| jonathanbentz wrote:
| Just meant that as a post script. Sorry for the confusion.
| cdiamand wrote:
| From my business life I'm looking at the MRR of my project
| https://topstonks.com, our site traffic, etc.
|
| From my personal life -
|
| I guess stepping on the scale in the mornings, haha. That's a
| depressing one to watch. There are the obvious personal finance
| metrics as well.
|
| Also keeping an eye on inflation... maybe Covid infection numbers
| as well since those seem to be in the news alot. It's kind of
| hard not to see those numbers lately.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| My inbox count, otherwise - I try to minimize this! Growing up,
| it was nearly an obsession in my household.
|
| I realized this lead to a certain amount of stress and my attempt
| to combat this is - 'let things be' (to an extent).
|
| I can't help but obsess about sleep, and time spent in meetings.
| Things that tend to have a negative side, rather than positive.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Things I think about and physically log: -
| Investments (monthly) - Estimated monthly budget
|
| Things I think about and mentally log: - Actual
| monthly spending - Caffeine intake - Hours of sleep
| hobr wrote:
| Watts/kg output when cycling. On 1min, 5min, 20min and 60 minute
| windows. This is the only one I think that I _obsess_ over.
|
| I keep rough track on my weight, but mostly over a quarterly
| scale and mostly as a big input to my W/kg!
| francisofascii wrote:
| - Running Mileage on Strava. (have a goal of 2K for the year)
|
| - Winnings/Losses $ each week on FanDuel/DraftKings
|
| - MPGe while driving with a Prius Prime
| klausjensen wrote:
| For ~10 years I have been doing what I call my "Daily Score". It
| is basically me reflecting and self-evaluating my day in 6
| categories, that are the most relevant to me:
|
| - Sleep - Diet - Exercise - Execution (how well did I did what I
| should be doing) - Mood - Social (how much did I socialize, spend
| time with loved ones etc)
|
| The value is:
|
| - During the day I might consider: "what would it take to end
| this day on a 3 in Diet", for example - When I enter the values
| for a day, I reflect over what went well/wrong - which can help
| me improve
|
| Every morning, I get an email with a reminder to fill in my Daily
| Score for the previous day. It takes 30-60 seconds - sometimes a
| bit more, if it sets off a chain of thoughts.
|
| It started out a spreadsheet, then I built a simple web-app for
| it about a year ago.
|
| I often thought about sharing it, but doubt it makes sense
| without a lot of explanation about the value being in the self-
| reflection - not the data.
| donclark wrote:
| Is your web-app for public use? I am curious to learn more
| and/or to use it.
| muzani wrote:
| Have you learned anything interesting or unexpected? I try this
| for a few weeks at a time then stop because the only thing I've
| learned is that tracking myself makes all the metrics slip. But
| I assume that after several months, you'll get some reliable
| data.
| uniformlyrandom wrote:
| I have come down to one metric in the end - sleep time (tracking
| with sleep++ on apple watch).
|
| The rest of the metrics lost meaning to me - they fluctuate too
| much depending on the weather / schedule / other factors. They
| also do not affect me as much as sleep.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-11-12 23:02 UTC)