Tracking my personal reliability: I’ve made it a strict personal rule that every time I utter a statement starting with “I will” to someone, no matter how casually, I log the commitment, with a due date, and keep track of when I follow through. Using a highly over-engineered formula, I turn all that data into a single reliability metric. It’s roughly measuring the probability that any given “I will” statement I make will turn out to be true. But it also accounts for it being kinda true – when I do follow through but not by the deadline I specified.
I gave this talk yesterday and it seemed to be really well received! Multiple people said they had a kind of lightbulb moment from it, so that was nice to hear.
I have the slides in Keynote which I don’t think is very convenient but I think it’s worth turning what I said into a blog post so I’ll do that. And the QS conference should have video of the talk eventually so I’ll commit to blogging it within a couple days of that.
Curious: Regarding the problem of the overall reliability metric becoming less and less motivating over time: Would it make sense to apply assymptotic temporal discounting to that metric? So, every commitment would contribute to your overall reliability metric, but recent commitments would contribute to it exponentially more. It feels like that actually might make the metric more informative, too, as a 90% reliability metric resulting from 9 months of perfection followed by 1 month of doing absolutely nothing doesn’t seem like it’s conveying the right thing, even more so if you’re talking a scale of years instead of months.
