Lessons from the Skinner box: False metrics and the beginning blogger

My blog is a Skinner box.

Put a pigeon into a box with a button that dispenses a reward (food). If the pigeon pecks at the button but never receives the reward, it quickly loses interest. If pecking always gives the reward, the pigeon will peck at a fairly steady rate. But if pecking gives the reward unpredictably—using a “variable-rate schedule of reinforcement”—the pigeon will peck away obsessively.

So, as I said: my blog is a Skinner box. Analytics is the button that releases the reward. And me?

I’m the pigeon.

When I first launched the blog, I would check Google Analytics throughout the day, at an increasing rate and with increased urgency, eager to see how many views my posts were getting. Three new views! Two! Zero!? One! Another one!

But there’s a problem: this is the wrong metric for my goals.

I started this blog as a way to shift from being a consumer of other peoples’ work to being a producer of my own work, to develop the habits and attitudes of a writer. And while views may become a byproduct of this—like most writers, I would like to build an audience—it’s too early to worry about that.

Set aside that fact that we’re talking really minuscule numbers at this point. Focusing on the wrong metric—on views—led me to make some silly choices. There was that time I posted an entry a day early, just to bump that week’s number of views. (It worked, for that week, but the next week’s numbers predictably suffered.) And then there was the week I spent too much time cranking out fictionary terms. (It was fun, but did little to build the habits and attitudes of a writer—indeed, it pulled my attention away from more substantial work.)

I finally came to my senses when I caught myself padding a fictionary definition, simply so that people on Facebook would click through to the blog to see the end of the post. Really? I was going to inconvenience my audience—and since we’re talking about Facebook, that “audience” is largely comprised of family and friends—just to boost the number of views in Google Analytics?

Lame.

So I’ve settled down a bit. I’m allowing myself a fairly relaxed schedule—one fictionary term and one longer-ish post each week—while I limp towards the end of the semester. I’m cobbling together my first video essay. And, though they are still a bit vague and distant, a few writing ideas are starting to take shape.

I’m not saying I’m free of the Skinner box; I still glance, too often, at those dopamine-inducing graphs and charts. But focusing on the correct metrics—am I writing daily? am I posting on schedule? am I generating new ideas?—ensures that I don’t spend my time on the wrong things.