Throw Away the Yardstick

When I was a young man training in aikido a long time ago, one of the people in the dojo whom I admired most was an older guy with the nickname "Wyandotte Joe."

When I met him, he was in his early 50's (younger than I am now). He had never done anything athletic in his life. His wife was out of the picture (I can't remember if that was because of a divorce or she had passed) and his kids were grown. He was always interested in Asian things and found himself drawn to the aikido class.
 
Joe just showed up. Every day. He was always there. He had his physical limitations, but trained sincerely. He tested for rank whenever he was due and as I recall failed as many tests as he passed, but it never seemed to effect him (the last time I saw him which was decades ago, he was a 3rd Dan. 

I don't even know if he is still alive. He just showed up and trained.
 
Perhaps there is a lesson there for us all.

At the end of the day, I'm basically an engineer. It is my inclination to organize and measure things. Sometimes this can have a detrimental effect on my practice.

I may get so caught up in doing x number of repetitions that I focus on the quantity and not the quality.

Below is an excerpt from the excellent Zen Habits blog on the wisdom of sometimes perhaps not measuring. The whole article may be read here. Enjoy.

Untrack: Letting Go of the Stress of Measuring

‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure.’ ~old management adage
‘You can’t manage without pleasure.’ ~Leo Babauta

Post written by Leo Babauta.

There are a few old management adages that seem to run like a current through our society, powering our work and personal lives: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” and “You are what you measure” and “You get what you measure”.
And I’ve fallen for it myself. At various times, I’ve tracked workouts, miles run, everything I’ve eaten, every single work task I complete, progress towards goals, my weight, my body fat percentage, how many days I’ve done a habit in a month, words written each day, books I’ve read, expenses, earnings, debt, website visitors, ad clicks, tweets, followers, and on and on. Sometimes I’ve tracked a few of these at the same time.
I’m not alone — there are people who track the most minute details of their lives, from heartbeats to steps walked to hours slept (and quality of the sleep) to emails sent. As a society, we’re tracking and measuring more than ever before.
What’s the theory here? And is it true? And is it necessary?
The theory behind measuring: is that unless you measure something you don’t know if it is getting better or worse. You can’t manage for improvement if you don’t measure to see what is getting better and what isn’t.
And to some extent, this is true.
If you measure how many hours you spent writing, it’s very possible that that number will increase, simply because you are measuring it, more aware of it, more focused on it, and motivated for that number to increase. If you measure miles run, that number will likely improve (until you get injured or burnt out).
But how do you measure the hills you ran during those miles, or the spurts of speed you occasionally threw in, or the enjoyment of the view? How do you measure the great conversations you had with your wife as you did those runs? How do you track the ideas you had on the run, the health benefit of the runs, the new places you explored? You could try to track all of these things, but then you’d be tracking 20 things instead of just miles run.
Work is the same way — you can measure 1 or 10 metrics for productivity, but does it measure the relationships you’ve built with your readers or customers, or the enjoyment you’ve gotten doing the work, or the things you’ve learned by making mistakes, or the pure joy you’ve gotten in making someone’s life better? Go ahead and try to measure that.
When you track a metric, such as hours or dollars or miles, you are saying that’s more important than all the things that can’t be measured. You put that in the forefront of your head as the thing that must be improved, at the cost of all else. What about relationships and joy? Are those less important?
Then there are other problems with tracking and measuring everything:

• It takes time to measure and track — that’s valuable time you could have spent doing or living.
• It creates a mindset that we must always improve, always measure, always manage things, always strive for better, better, better. What about learning to be happy with yourself? What about focusing on joy and compassion and people you love? When does the improving stop? Are we ever satisfied? And is that the point of living — to improve endlessly, to always make things better, and never be happy with where we are?
• It’s stressful to measure and track a lot of things, and it’s disappointing if those numbers don’t go up, or don’t go up as much as we’d hoped.
• We have to choose what to measure, and how do we know we’re choosing the right thing? Why is that thing the only thing that matters? It’s a narrowing way of looking at life.
• It doesn’t improve happiness. It doesn’t make us content. It doesn’t keep us in the moment.

I could go on and on. Measurement and tracking are tools, and there’s nothing wrong with using them. I’ve obviously used them many times, and still recommend them to most people. I just think we should consider whether there are alternatives, and question our dogma, and experiment to see what works best for us.