Eleven

The morning I finally took the watch off, I did something I should have done at least a year earlier, which was to count. Not the steps, which the watch had been counting for me without being asked, but the numbers themselves: how many separate figures my phone was prepared to tell me about my own body before I had spoken to another human being. I went through the apps one at a time and wrote them down. There were steps, of course, and sleep, broken into four stages with a percentage attached to each. There was resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and a readiness score that combined the two into a single verdict on the day ahead. There was a ring to close, a streak to keep, and a weekly summary that compared this week with last and had already decided which was better. By the time I had finished I was at eleven, and I had not yet opened the second app.

Eleven numbers, none of them asking how I felt and all of them telling me, and I had been reading them every morning for the best part of three years as though they were the weather.

I spent two decades in technology research, which is a polite way of saying that I read company accounts for a living and told people what to do about them, in print, with my name on it. That work installs a habit that is hard to lose. When a figure arrives unasked, you want to know who produced it, how it was calculated, and what they get if you believe it, and I applied that habit to thousands of companies over the years without once applying it to my own wrist. I find that telling, because it says something about how good the design is. A number that comes from a device you chose and paid for does not feel like somebody else's number. It feels like the truth about you, delivered by a neutral party, and it never occurs to you to ask what the neutral party is for.

Each of the eleven was perfectly reasonable on its own, and that is exactly what made the whole arrangement so hard to see. Of course you want to know how you slept. Of course a step target helps on the days you would otherwise not move at all. Of course it is useful to know that your resting heart rate has been drifting upwards for a fortnight, because that is a real signal and sometimes it matters a great deal. Take any one of the eleven, hold it up and defend it, and you can, and I did, for years, to myself and to anyone at the breakfast table who asked why I was looking at my phone rather than at them. The problem was never a single metric. It was the sum: eleven verdicts, every morning, delivered before coffee, each one carrying a comparison inside it. Below average. Down on last week. Streak at risk. I am a grown man with thirty years of work behind me, two daughters, and a reasonable grasp of what a good day looks like, and I was holding a small screen at six in the morning to find out whether I was allowed to feel rested.

The night that settled it, I had slept well. I knew I had slept well in the way you know you have eaten when you are not hungry, which is to say without needing to be told. The number said 61, and underneath it a note suggested I try harder tonight, and I read that note before I had said good morning to anyone, and some part of the day was already decided.

I know what this is, because I spent my career watching it happen to companies. When a measurement becomes a target, the thing being measured begins to perform for the measurement. Give a business a quarterly earnings figure to hit and the quarter bends to fit it: costs get moved, sales get pulled forward, the number is met and the business is slightly worse than it would otherwise have been, every ninety days, for years, and nobody inside it is being dishonest. They are responding to the measure exactly as the measure asks. I rated companies that did this. I wrote notes warning clients about it. Then I bought a ring and strapped the same mechanism to my finger, and I wore it to bed.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument against knowing things about yourself, and I am not against the data. I am against being graded on it, every day, by something I paid for, and the difference between the two comes down to who the number is for. A figure you went looking for, once, to answer a question you actually had, is yours. A figure that arrives every morning whether you asked or not, compares you with yesterday, and finds you wanting, exists to keep you opening the app, and I say that without any judgement of the people who build these things. It is simply what the business model requires. I used to value businesses whose revenue depended on exactly this, and I could tell you which line in the accounts the streak is protecting.

The count is what breaks the spell, and I think I understand why. In the whole arrangement, the count is the one number nobody is selling you. No app will tell you how many verdicts it hands down before breakfast, because the honest total is faintly ridiculous, and ridiculous is the beginning of the end for any habit. Mine was eleven, and once I had written the figure down I could not unread it, in the same way that a board cannot unsee a cost line once somebody has finally put it on one page.

So the practice this week takes thirty seconds and changes nothing yet. Tomorrow morning, before you do anything else, count. Go through every app on your phone and every screen on your wrist and write down each separate number they hold about you before you have spoken to anyone: steps, sleep, readiness, rings, streaks, the weekly comparison, all of it. Write the total on a piece of paper and leave it there. Do not take anything off and do not change a setting, because the point this week is not to fix it but to know the number. I would be surprised if yours was lower than mine, and I would be more interested in how it felt to find out than in the figure itself, because the feeling is the information. The number was never describing your day. It had quietly started deciding it, and the count is the first morning in a long time that you get there first.

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