All right, we got a question now moving on from Luke. Luke says, When is deep work not the most important personal metric? All right, he elaborates in the book decoding greatness. Ron Friedman talks about the importance of tracking your important metrics. He even quotes you. How do I know if hours of deep work is the highest leverage metric for me or something else?

Well, it's a good question. I think a useful, a useful bit of terminology when thinking about professional metrics comes from the the book, the four disciplines of execution for DX, which I talked about briefly in my book, deep work. And they make a useful distinction, which I've heard other people make as well between what they call lead indicators and lag indicators.

When it comes to measuring what matters for your work to be more successful. Lag indicators are the things in the end you actually care about. Right? I mean, this is the thing in the end that you want to actually improve. And it's very specific to the type of work you do.

The example in 40 x is a supermarket bakery counter or something like this. And the lag indicator was sale numbers. In the end, we want sales numbers to go up. If you run a podcast, the lag indicator might be downloads. Now, how many people are listening to the show or how many in writing, how many people buy my book or in, you know, how much units do we sell of this product is the thing you actually care about in the end.

Now, what they talk about, and maybe this is what Friedman's talking about, too, is just tracking lag indicators is not enough to actually help you in the moment do the things that matter because it lags. It's not like you can do something today and immediately see its impact on those indicators that matter.

And so what they argue is you should have lead indicators, things you can track today, that can influence your behavior today, that if you hit good numbers on those, it will down the line, help the lag indicators grow. So in the bakery scenario, you want the sales to go up, but the lead indicator might be something like, how many customers did we help or how many different display cases or did we clean?

I mean, I don't know about bakery, but stuff you can actually do. Deep work is a lead indicator. For a lot of jobs, keeping track of how much deep work am I doing is a useful lead indicator. Because if deep work is necessary for moving the needle in your job, you need to do it to actually move the needle in your job.

So it is it is useful. I don't know if I would call it the most important metric, though. I mean, in this case, two other things matter. Hey, do you have your lag indicators? Right? And are you looking at them? If you're just doing deep work for the sake of doing deep work, meaningless.

You got to know the needle you're trying to move in the end, you got to be watching that needle to see if it's moving. And that needle is not moving, even though you're doing a lot of deep work, then to you have to care about what deep work Am I doing?

Like, what is the right type of deep work that's going to move the needle on this particular thing that I care about on this particular lag indicator. So don't get too obsessive about just here's my deep work tally. I got six hours this week. That's an important tally to do.

But only if you know what you're doing during those deep work hours, and it's tied to a very specific longer term goal that you're keeping a very careful eye on.