Yesterday I ended a five-and-a-half year streak of doing a daily steps target.
Goodhart’s Law states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Having a daily step target started out as useful but it’s increasingly become a chore, no longer driving any actual benefits.
Walking 10,000 steps (my current goal) has little impact on my health compared to a currently poor diet. There are benefits to the step count such as time out of the house and daily commitment to exercise; but these can be achieved without a specific target. And some of the time saved from not walking 10,000 steps could be spent on a few minutes of more useful exercise.
The danger of streaks is that they feed into the sunk cost fallacy. You treat the streak as a thing that has value in itself.
It feels strange not to be wearing a fitbit whenever I leave the house, but I think it’s a good thing.
My fitbit lasted for about 6 months, after which I lost it and I figured its job must be done. That wasn’t really the case – I’ve since slipped into bad habits, and on occasion I’ve used the fitness app on my phone as a fitbit replacement, but overall, yeah, not a fan of targets.
Weird, yesterday, visiting a Zen Buddhist abbey and seeing one of the monks wearing a fitbit.
Surely it affects the monk’s mindfulness? I wish you’d asked about it!