Data

Everyone wants to be "data-driven." But most teams are driven by the data that's easy to collect, not the data that actually answers their questions. Convenient data and useful data are rarely the same thing.

I logged every working hour for three months. The gap between where my time actually went and where I thought it went was humbling, and useful.

I tracked every working hour for 30 days, expecting to learn I code a lot. The data said something far more uncomfortable about how I actually spend my day.

Indexes, transactions and joins stopped being scary. The mental models that turned the database from a black box into a tool I actually control.