So you’ve spent the time and energy to create something that’s meaningful to at least a few people, built up the courage to release it into the world, and have distanced yourself enough — at least for a time — to gather data before assessing and tweaking your strategy.

But when the time comes to assess your work, what are you actually looking for?

Avoid Overvaluing The Low Hanging Fruit

Of course, there are the easy metrics to judge the “success” your work on.

Pageviews, revenue, downloads, claps, followers and the like make it oh so easy to rate and measure our work.

As a bonus, many of these metrics are publically visible, making it handy for us to get-into-the-comparison-game-feel-bad-about-ourselves-pack-up-go-home-and-never-create-again.

Huzzah!

Sure, these stats are important, and sometimes even essential to understanding how our work is being received and measuring the effectiveness of any future tweaks, experiments or campaigns, but they often don’t tell the whole story.

Ok, so maybe if the sole purpose of what you’re doing is to make money, then you can probably stick to the aforementioned hard numbers.

But for people like us creating work that means something both to us and others, we have to expand the assessment of our work to consider other variables, which are often much harder to measure.

Looking Beyond Hard Metrics

Depending on the work you do, the less tangible costs and benefits will vary. You’re likely going to have to do some thinking to define them for yourself initially.

Working with podcasters, the easy metric to judge the success of a show on is downloads. You can then look past that to email list signups, product sales, website page views and so on.

All of those are useful and almost everyone who starts a podcast will have a goal of growing each of those metrics. After all, they’re an easy way to judge whether your content is resonating with your audience.

But in my experience working with dozens of podcasters, I see time and time again that one of the most impactful and beneficial side effects of starting a podcast doesn’t appear anywhere in those metrics.

What our clients tell me over and over is that the podcast would be worth continuing — even if they never got another download — simply because of the opportunities it grants them to reach out and make connections with interesting people.

These are people who are often more than a little out of their league who they would otherwise never have an excuse to sit down and talk with for 30–60 minutes and maybe even begin an ongoing relationship with.

There’s no metric to neatly measure the impact that these relationships might have on a podcast host’s life and business.

But it’s impossible to argue they’re not valuable.

Let’s Talk Writing Intangibles

Or take this blog for example.

I set the goal of writing every day for three primary reasons, all hard to measure.

The first was to give myself an opportunity to improve my writing by doing it regularly, this might be the easiest to measure.

The second was to build a habit around writing and break down any resistance I had around it. Basically to keep the wheels greased for future writing projects with more intention and purpose behind them.

The last, hardest to measure and most valuable to me is that I found myself jotting down dozens of bullet point notes throughout my weeks but never set aside the time or energy to think through any of them.

I wanted a chance to define, explore, expand on and then share those ideas in a structured manner.

Sometimes there’s not much to an idea once I’ve explored it than the initial thought itself. Sometimes there’s something there that invites me to look closer and dig deeper. Either way, it’s worth it to me to know whether something is worth thinking more about or not.

Right now, the ideas are rough. The writing is rough.

But two weeks in, I can already identify some broader themes to my thought patterns that are interesting and exciting to me. And while I highly doubt there will be any measurable ROI in the short term, I’m convinced that there will be massive ROI in the long term by giving myself a forum to think and explore.

Know Why You’re Doing The Work

Understanding the less measurable, less tangible outcomes of your work can certainly help you make decisions about the direction of your work, but it can also help keep you going when the metrics aren’t where you’d like them to be.

Maybe it’s that while your new product isn’t selling as much as you’d like, you learned a ton that you’ll be able to put into use in all your future campaigns.

Maybe it’s that you can see the impact your work has on the people who interact with it.

Maybe it’s the people you get to meet through the work you do.

Maybe it’s that you just enjoy the work itself. In the long run, that matters more than almost anything else.

By taking into account the full spectrum of both what we put into and what we get out of our work, we can make better decisions about why we’re doing what we’re doing and ultimately create better work.

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Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!

https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/know-when-assess-work-af24ef790c6ahttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/know-when-assess-work-af24ef790c6a