When Is Deep Work Not the Most Important Metric?

00:00:00.000 | All right, we got a question now moving on from Luke. Luke says, When is deep work not

00:00:13.780 | the most important personal metric? All right, he elaborates in the book decoding greatness.

00:00:24.540 | Ron Friedman talks about the importance of tracking your important metrics. He even quotes

00:00:28.540 | you. How do I know if hours of deep work is the highest leverage metric for me or something

00:00:34.140 | else? Well, it's a good question. I think a useful, a useful bit of terminology when

00:00:41.740 | thinking about professional metrics comes from the the book, the four disciplines of

00:00:48.840 | execution for DX, which I talked about briefly in my book, deep work. And they make a useful

00:00:57.040 | distinction, which I've heard other people make as well between what they call lead indicators

00:01:02.640 | and lag indicators. When it comes to measuring what matters for your work to be more successful.

00:01:09.660 | Lag indicators are the things in the end you actually care about. Right? I mean, this is

00:01:14.500 | the thing in the end that you want to actually improve. And it's very specific to the type

00:01:18.360 | of work you do. The example in 40 x is a supermarket bakery counter or something like this. And

00:01:25.040 | the lag indicator was sale numbers. In the end, we want sales numbers to go up. If you

00:01:30.600 | run a podcast, the lag indicator might be downloads. Now, how many people are listening

00:01:36.380 | to the show or how many in writing, how many people buy my book or in, you know, how much

00:01:43.000 | units do we sell of this product is the thing you actually care about in the end. Now, what

00:01:48.000 | they talk about, and maybe this is what Friedman's talking about, too, is just tracking lag indicators

00:01:54.960 | is not enough to actually help you in the moment do the things that matter because it

00:02:00.440 | lags. It's not like you can do something today and immediately see its impact on those indicators

00:02:06.740 | that matter. And so what they argue is you should have lead indicators, things you can

00:02:10.720 | track today, that can influence your behavior today, that if you hit good numbers on those,

00:02:17.700 | it will down the line, help the lag indicators grow. So in the bakery scenario, you want

00:02:25.460 | the sales to go up, but the lead indicator might be something like, how many customers

00:02:30.700 | did we help or how many different display cases or did we clean? I mean, I don't know

00:02:36.940 | about bakery, but stuff you can actually do. Deep work is a lead indicator. For a lot of

00:02:42.980 | jobs, keeping track of how much deep work am I doing is a useful lead indicator. Because

00:02:49.700 | if deep work is necessary for moving the needle in your job, you need to do it to actually

00:02:54.340 | move the needle in your job. So it is it is useful. I don't know if I would call it the

00:02:58.700 | most important metric, though. I mean, in this case, two other things matter. Hey, do

00:03:04.420 | you have your lag indicators? Right? And are you looking at them? If you're just doing

00:03:07.920 | deep work for the sake of doing deep work, meaningless. You got to know the needle you're

00:03:13.020 | trying to move in the end, you got to be watching that needle to see if it's moving. And that

00:03:17.340 | needle is not moving, even though you're doing a lot of deep work, then to you have to care

00:03:20.560 | about what deep work Am I doing? Like, what is the right type of deep work that's going

00:03:26.980 | to move the needle on this particular thing that I care about on this particular lag indicator.

00:03:31.380 | So don't get too obsessive about just here's my deep work tally. I got six hours this week.

00:03:37.340 | That's an important tally to do. But only if you know what you're doing during those

00:03:41.980 | deep work hours, and it's tied to a very specific longer term goal that you're keeping a very

00:03:45.900 | careful eye on.