If you want to come up with effective metrics, forget brainstorming. Drop the creativity. Done well, this is an analytical exercise, says Stacey Barr, and it should aim at deriving concrete, sensory effects to measure.
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BI for the lone wolf
Three years ago, I spent four months in my Sicilian grandmother’s home town editing a book I had begun to hate. Time cues were sparse: church bells four times an hour, a nearby friend who dropped in for coffee once a day, and cannoli once a week. I could easily come to the end of a week without having made a single edit. So I built myself a timekeeper in FileMaker Pro.
At first, the dismal results came in every day: When I felt that I had put in a good five or six hours of steady work, the end-of-day tally—with all the breaks for email, meals, snacks, and quick walks—usually amounted to about two hours of actual work.… Read the rest “BI for the lone wolf”
Metrics your mother warned you about
I could easily find a parking place in Berkeley on Saturday! What could it mean? On a normal afternoon in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, I usually find just one space open, and often I have to drive around the block once…. Ah, it’s the end of Easter week and a bunch of the university people have gone away. So much for bigger meanings like recession, breaking news on TV or sunspots.
Sometimes such offbeat indicators do mean something. How would we know if the U.S. economy has begun sliding into a severe recession? By a surge in the number of eBay items for sale, according to one article in the March 23 New York Times.… Read the rest “Metrics your mother warned you about”