Goodhart’s Law

Never heard of this until recently but I like it.

Best phrased by Marilyn Strathern “”When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Good example would be in customer service call centres. If we measure an employees performance by number of calls answered than it’s likely they will sacrifice the quality of service in order to answer more calls.

Same goes with deciding to wake up earlier. We can easily track our performance on this. But what is the purpose? And, what are the side effects?

Waking up early can be great. In recent times I have been an early riser (excluding this whole pandemic period, which is another story). But if we wake up earlier and sacrifice a regular sleep schedule then it can likely totally negate the reason we are doing it.