Member-only story
Why I took a year off from tracking metrics.
When I first started writing, metrics were everything to me. I would constantly refresh my stats to see likes, comments, downloads, revenue. The numbers going up felt like validation that I was on the right path.
But over time, I realised chasing metrics was ruining my creativity and passion. I would find myself optimising every post half to death, just to game the algorithms — rather than pouring my soul into quality work that I genuinely gave a shit about. I would second-guess my ideas, changing course from topics I cared about to ones that seemed more likely to be popular. And when the numbers would stall or go down, I’d burn out. I’d slump.
The metrics were noise that often had little correlation with the effect I actually wanted to make. Some of my most meaningful pieces, the best work I published — in terms of people reaching out or impacting readers — barely moved the metrics needle. While a couple of viral hits might have generated some revenue, they failed every personal measure of quality or value.
So about a year ago, I decided to stop tracking granular metrics altogether for a full year as an experiment. I have a broad idea of how my traffic has performed since I left Substack for good. But I couldn’t even tell you how many newsletter subscribers or paid patrons I have.
