Most work today runs on deterministic goals — goals set at the outset, measured at the end. Businesspeople call these Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. As I’ve taken my work more seriously, I’ve set myself increasingly ambitious goals: solve 1 million accessibility bugs, raise $500M. KPIs have been useful in telling the story of what I want to do and how well I have done it. In other words, they’ve given justification to my work. But I don’t think they have made me happier.
A project usually follows the same emotional arc. It starts with a spike of optimism when you set the goal, followed by a smaller burst of motivation once the work begins. Then comes the long middle: a stretch dominated by stress, as KPI pressure and deadlines take over. At the end, there’s a brief spike of relief if you succeed, or sorrow if you don’t — and that spike rarely lasts. Even on a success, joy shows up only at the edges: optimism at the start, relief at the end. The rest is stress. And a bigger goal doesn’t seem to buy a meaningfully bigger peak at either end.
Abandon KPIs altogether?
My answer is increasingly that I should content myself with less ambitious goals. Instead of only asking which goal will make my boss happy, I am increasingly asking, “What goal can I work on that doesn’t stress me out?” In other words, my KPI in setting KPIs is becoming “amount of stress I get from pursuing this goal.”
When I am unstressed, I sleep better, eat better, am friendlier, and am happier. The question always creeps in, “Can I be doing more?” But I find that my desire to make a greater impact is contented if my small KPI is part of a bigger picture.
That bigger picture becomes stressful if it is a KPI in itself. “Tackle 10 accessibility issues this year so I can reach 200 in 20 years” raises stressful questions because I have no idea what I will be doing in 20 years. A better big picture goal is abstract, like “be good to those around me and close with those I love.”
I can both be happy and justified if I allow myself to be content with chipping away at modest goals that lead to a big, abstract picture of goodness.
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