The Days Got Bigger

My Oura ring and my Apple Watch used to tell me I had lost. They never said it in those words. A ring that did not close said it, a streak that reset said it, and a sleep score of 61 said it most clearly of all, with a note underneath suggesting I try harder tonight. I would read that note before I had spoken to another human being, and some part of the day was already decided.

I spent two decades rating companies for a living. Buy, hold or sell, in print, with my name on it, revised whenever the evidence moved. That work teaches you something about scoring that is hard to unlearn: when you score a thing every day, the thing starts performing for the score. A business that is rated on quarterly numbers will, sooner or later, begin to manage the quarter rather than the business. The people inside it are not fools. They are responding to the measure exactly as the measure asks them to, and the measure cannot tell the difference between a company that is improving and a company that has learned what the grader wants to see. I watched this happen often enough that I stopped being surprised by it. A score, applied daily, stops describing the thing and starts shaping it.

Now we do it to ourselves. We count steps, hours of sleep, glasses of water, words learned and days in a row. Each count arrives with a target, and each target arrives with a verdict, and the verdicts begin before the day has properly started. The sleep was scored while you slept. The ring is already behind by the time you have made coffee. The streak is at risk from the moment you wake up and will remain at risk until you have done the thing that protects it. None of these measures is wrong, exactly. Sleep matters, movement matters, learning a language matters. What has changed is that the measuring has become the point, and a person managing their own metrics behaves precisely like the company managing its quarter. They start performing for the score, and the score cannot tell whether they are living better or just reporting better.

The result is that living turns into a game you can lose before breakfast.

So I stopped. The watch is off, the trackers are gone and there are no daily targets left anywhere in my life. I have kept exactly one streak, which is Duolingo, and I am not proud of it; it survives because the cost of losing it is apparently more than I am willing to pay, which tells you everything about how these mechanisms work. The rest went in a single afternoon, and the first thing I noticed was how little I missed any of it. I had expected to feel untethered. I felt lighter.

Here is what I have noticed since, and I want to be careful with the words. The days got bigger. I do not mean better, because better is itself a score, and I am trying to leave that habit behind. I mean bigger. More of each day was mine. The hour after waking was no longer spent reading a verdict on the night before. The walk was a walk rather than a step count in progress. The evening ended when I was tired rather than when a device decided my bedtime window had opened. There was simply more room in the day, because a surprising amount of it had been occupied by the small, constant work of checking whether I was winning.

I have come to think this is the quiet cost of the whole arrangement, and it is a cost the people I work with pay more heavily than most. They are already measured all day: by revenue, by pipeline, by the team, by the market, by their own ambition. Then they go home and measure themselves some more, in the name of rest, and wonder why the rest does not work. A person who is graded from the moment they wake to the moment they sleep has no hours in which they are simply allowed to be a person. That is not a matter of habits. It is an attention problem, and attention is the one resource a business owner cannot buy more of.

I am now building two small things around this, for anyone with too much on. I will say more about them when they are ready, but the design rule is already fixed. Neither of them scores you. Neither has a streak. If you miss a day, nothing happens, because a tool meant to give you your days back cannot also be the thing that grades them. I am testing both with a few people over the next fortnight, and if you are tired of being graded by your own phone, you are exactly who they are for.

In the meantime, try the experiment I ran, for one week. Turn off every daily score that is not keeping you alive or employed, and notice what the first hour of each day is like without a verdict in it. You will not lose the sleep or the steps. You will lose the game, and the game was never the point.

Continue reading: When the Models Agree →

Or start the diagnosis: Take the free 10-minute Entrepreneur Gap scan →

The book: The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It →