What McNamara's body count has to do with a wake-up video
The McNamara fallacy: measure what is easy, then decide the rest does not matter. Yankelovich's four steps from 1971, applied to proof-of-waking apps.
The McNamara fallacy is the habit of treating whatever is easy to measure as the only thing that matters. Daniel Yankelovich laid it out in four steps in a 1971 speech: measure what can be measured easily; disregard what cannot, or give it an arbitrary number; presume that what cannot be measured easily is not very important; and finally say that it does not exist.
Morning habits fall into step one by accident. DontSnooze counts one thing: whether you showed up on camera when the alarm went off. That is a clean, checkable fact, and it is exactly the kind of fact that starts the slide. A forty-morning streak says you were upright forty times. It says nothing about whether you slept five hours, whether you did the thing you got up for, or whether the person on the video was glad to be there.
The counterweight is cheap. Next to any number you track, keep one thing you cannot count: a word, a rating out of five, a sentence on how the day went. If the streak climbs while the sentence gets shorter, you have found the thing the count was hiding. A second number can help too, and wake-time variability in a spreadsheet is a better one than a streak.
The sturdiest defense of any metric is a second, uglier measure it cannot explain away, which is also the point of Goodhart’s law for personal goals. Nobody has to throw out the count. They just have to stop letting it speak last.