Do you write for your readers, or do you write for your numbers?
Once we see a number, we want to make it go up. It’s addicting. It doesn’t matter what number it is. Your bank account, your Instagram, your step count, and, of course, your stats on writing platforms.
A higher number leads to a shot of dopamine. It feels good. Mmmh. You beat yesterday. Nice. But then what? Oh no! What if I lose the new number? What if it’s not higher again tomorrow? Where is my dopamine? I need my fix!
Stats are the bane of a writer’s existence. They give you a sense of control where you have none. If you publish something and the number goes up, you think you should write another post like that. If you publish something and the number goes down, you think you should avoid that kind of post in the future.
This is bad judgment because it’s not based on any critical reflection of your artistic work. It’s based on an outcome which you don’t control and that has an infinite variety of input variables. Here are some of the factors that determine how many views you get on any platform on any given day:
- Did it rain in the US? Where? How much? For how long? The more people stay inside, the more might read one of your articles.
- Did the system pick up an old article and suddenly distribute it?
- Is it a public holiday in a big country? Do people spend more time with family?
- Who tweeted one of your stories? Did they send you a bunch of traffic?
- What happens in the world at large? Did a sudden change in government regulation, Google’s algorithm, or a scientific breakthrough make one of your old pieces relevant again?
- Did you publish an article today? Did it immediately go viral?
Those last two questions make up a fraction of the overall determinants of your daily stats, especially because the second part almost never happens. Unless you publish a new post that gets 10k views in a day, your latest article contributes almost zero to your daily stats. And yet, you decide what to write next on that number.
Here’s where it gets worse: That number is wrong. Every day, the numbers you see on your many dashboards are wrong. Your evidence is not just the wrong evidence, it’s also flawed.
This isn’t limited to writing platforms. It applies to every piece of data reporting software ever built. Tracking is hard. Tracking with 100% accuracy is impossible.
Yesterday, my stats showed half the number they showed the day before. Does that mean only half the people read my articles? Of course not. A number on a screen has nothing to do with what happens in the real world. You should wrap your head around this.
When you use stats to make your decisions, to a certain degree, you’re working off perception, not reality. How much of what’s displayed is wrong, outdated, or irrelevant to the decision you’re trying to make? 10%? 30%? 50%? You don’t know, but your default is to expect 100% accuracy.
The numbers just look too good on the screen. So convincing, aren’t they? Well, they’re lying. What if the system has an outage? What if their tool is counting too many views or too few? What if 30% of your views on Monday were external traffic you got by chance but didn’t know was there? See how easy it is to make nonsense of your precious data? It’s not that valuable.
What’s valuable is looking at your work with a critical eye. What’s valuable is reading the comments. Where’s the constructive feedback? Where’s the evolution of thought?
Maybe, you shouldn’t drop that type of article because it doesn’t generate views. Maybe, you should drop it because you’ve written it a million times before. Or because you were wrong. Or because it’s not a style that fits you.
Maybe, you should write more about creativity not because it gets shares, but because you think it’s interesting. Maybe, you can find a breakthrough idea or formulate a better hypothesis with time.
All trackable metrics suffer from the same issue: You can’t count everything that matters, and some things you can count don’t matter at all.
Forget the stats. Check them once a week. Clear your head before you make creative decisions. Think about the context, the people, the place each piece takes in the bigger picture, not about which number might go up or down.
For all you know, it’s the wrong number, incorrect to begin with, and it won’t applaud any of your work. Only we can do that. We, the readers. The people you write for. We appreciate your empathy.