Ask HN: What metrics do you pay attention to? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What metrics do you pay attention to?

115 pointsDerekBickerton78 comments

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?

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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.

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!

I was on vacation in my home country during the record heatwave this June, friends, drinking... by the metrics it was worse than covid :)

The hydration thing, I just got into the habit of dropping my soluble vitamin in a pint of ice cold water every morning and downing it then drinking normally through the day.

It takes a while between drinking and it having an affect (variant on numerous factors) but I found the morning fog within an hour of waking up was much reduced just by drinking immediately on waking.

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.

What device do you have? I bought the Forerunner 55 for the Garmin Coach and the Body Battery. While the coach has been good the Body Battery has been a complete disappointment. It's never gone above 50. I don't drink alcohol during the week, I exercise, I cut out coffee in the afternoon to see if that made a difference ... but nothing.

I have Instinct Solar. And I had a similar period of constantly low battery. I even thought that it was broken. The solution was two weeks vacation in the Mediterranean, after that 100 in the morning became frequent.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Check your settings. On mine I need to tell it when I am supposed to be sleeping 11 - 8 that’s how it knows to track sleep. It’s show me sleeping every night at 11 even if I’m not. Garmin instinct fyi.

Not exactly an answer to your question, but I ended up getting an Oura ring because of that issue. It's extremely accurate.

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.

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.

Glad to hear you recovered well from covid. Seems like a lot of hospitals have been filling up lately

What watch do you use?

Instinct Solar

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.

I've been lifting weights in and off over the past year and I've definitely noticed that my mood is better and more consistent in the weeks that I lift.

Good luck on your journey!

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.

What do you do with this information? Do you create multiple MVP games and then complete development based on wish list metrics?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

If you paid originally when it was one off you should be able to use 'restore purchases' in-app to get grandfathered access (everything apart from cloud sync)

I would love a simple well being tracker. If you made that app would absolutely pay for it.

I'm bookmarking your comment for the future beta testing :)

I've always used Daylio for mood tracking. You may find it useful :) https://daylio.net/

I made one that emails you at night time, asks how your day went, then click a few boxes on what you are tracking. I can send you the repo if you are interested.

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.

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.

Biggest lesson has been that the effect of tracking has led to positive improvements, because of the awarenes it creates.

Honestly - the data analysis and looking back - has taught me pretty very little I did not already know.

Yes, I can observe that some metrics almost always align, because exercising makes me more aware of my diet (not wanting to "waste" the effort made at the gym) - and that my mood and productivity are closely aligned as well.

I wish I could say I gained some big insight from looking back at the data, but really it is mostly jsut about the forced reflection here and now.

Is your web-app for public use? I am curious to learn more and/or to use it.

I am afraid not.

I think the explanations required around the process/reflection makes it too difficult to "market" - so I have put it off.

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/

>= 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

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/

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.

How do you track water intake?

I use an app called WaterMinder (it’s free, with a tipping option) that’s available for iPhone and Apple Watch. Whenever I drink some water (or water containing beverage), I just tap the app complication on the watch face and the appropriate water intake icon. You can configure different buttons/water volumes for a single-tap ease of use. Or you can tap on “Other” and then choose the kind of beverage and volume.

The app also has some adjustments on hydration percentages for different beverages (for example, if you drink black coffee, it will take 90% of the volume as water intake). You can even edit those values if you wish.

I track only the water I consume in beverages (including plain water), and don’t try to estimate the water contained in solid or cooked foods.

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)

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...)?

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).

Does high score cups of coffee seem to work out well for you?

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.

- 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

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.

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.

I track water by carrying around a large nalgene. Easy to remember to drink 2 full nalgenes than 8 cups of water.

- 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.

>- Happiness time

>What metrics do you pay attention to?

About the same. Reading only the headline, I expected business metrics not personal and jotted down the following. It really turned out more personal than anything.

To the extent that I'm working with equipment or material, am I getting a good amount of performance compared to what can be expected within the reasonable range? Is the cost appropriate for the performance?

Same with the people. Am I getting a good amount of value creation or invoiceable activity overall? Once again within the reasonable range.

Same with the clients. Am I giving them their money's worth in ways that sustain or grow operations?

Everyone needs to be enthusiastically capable and involved in pushing the client satisfaction level to the upper end of what's reasonable and keeping it there. Not only to remain within striking distance of the occasional unreasonable requirement.

Everyone needs to be smiling enough for you to hear it in their voice, and the equipment if any needs to be humming along nicely.

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.

Out of curiosity, what’s the business model for the project?

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.

PS?

Just meant that as a post script. Sorry for the confusion.

The only metric I currently pay attention to is the readiness score from my Oura ring.

It's interesting to see how much alcohol, eating just before sleeping or stress affects this score. And it's also nice to get the confirmation on how well I'm feeling from a tool that measures it.

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.

Strava training calendar/log. Strava freshness and fitness (though I know it is mostly bogus).

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.

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!

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

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.

- 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.

- 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

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

Weight lifted for barbell overhead press, squat, bench press, row, and pull-up.

I don't currently but I have read that HRV is very important.

The weather.

number of steps on apple health

pomodoro count

Net worth.

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