Employee #1: The Challenge of Setting Your Own Standards

The Internal Performance Review: "Would I Pay For This?"

One way I try to cut through the noise is by asking: "If I were managing someone else, would I consider this a good use of their paid time?" Framing it this way attempts to inject some objectivity. It shifts the focus from "Am I busy?" to "Am I creating value relative to my goals?"

It helps distinguish between genuinely valuable work and tasks that feel productive but don't move the needle. Think:

• Endlessly tweaking a landing page design vs. talking to potential users
• Spending hours comparing note-taking apps vs. actually shipping a feature
• Building complex internal dashboards prematurely vs. focusing on core product value

Hindsight makes these distinctions obvious, but in the moment? It's tough. Being honest requires acknowledging when you're procrastinating on the hard stuff (if you're lucky enough to even know what the hard stuff is) or getting lost in tasks you simply enjoy more, even if they aren't the highest priority. It's less about rigid judgment and more about cultivating self-awareness regarding your own patterns and priorities.

Opportunity Cost: Aligning Action with Intention

When you're the entire workforce, every choice has amplified consequences. Time spent on X is definitively time not spent on Y or Z. This isn't just about efficiency; it's about ensuring your actions align with your intended direction, whatever that may be for you.

Thinking about opportunity cost helps me evaluate potential work through lenses like:

• Direct Value: Does this directly lead to tangible progress, learning, or revenue? Is it core to the product or understanding the user?
• Compounding Potential: Is this an investment (like building a reusable component or automating a tedious process) that will save significant time or effort later?
• Personal Alignment: Does this leverage my unique skills and energy levels? Or will it drain me disproportionately, making me less effective overall? Sometimes, the optimal path isn't sustainable if it leads to burnout.

There's no perfect formula, but consciously filtering tasks helps ensure the limited resources you have — time/energy/focus — are directed towards what you deem important, not just what feels urgent or easy. Questions like these form your first real metrics (not vanity numbers) which should be genuine assessments of value and progress against your own standards.

The Siren Song of External Benchmarks

With these personal assessments in hand, why do we still find ourselves looking outwards for validation? It's natural to seek a roadmap. We consume stories of overnight successes, follow detailed "how-to" guides, and compare our progress against others. However, there's a danger in adopting these external benchmarks wholesale without considering their relevance to our unique situation.

Why?

• Narrative Fallacy: Success stories are often cleaned up in retelling. The messy detours, the failed experiments, the sheer luck involved, all that often gets smoothed over into a neat, linear narrative.
• Advice Decays: The tech landscape, market dynamics, and popular strategies change rapidly. What was gospel five years ago might be outdated today.
• Context is King: Their market, funding, team (or lack thereof), personal situation, and timing were likely vastly different from yours. What worked for them might be irrelevant or even detrimental for you.

That's not to say you should just ignore the world, but use these external examples as data points, potential inspiration, or cautionary tales. Your measurements should be based on your context. The most valuable comparison is often against your past self and your stated intentions. So how do we build this internal measurement system?

Your Personal Metrics

If external benchmarks are unreliable guides, how do you navigate? It comes down to building and trusting your own judgment, your internal scorecard. This involves continuous self-reflection and honesty. For me, this looks like asking:

Questions like these form your personal framework for making decisions. The more you use them, the more natural it becomes to evaluate your choices and progress on your own terms. What starts as a deliberate practice eventually becomes your default way of thinking.