Stop Watching the Scoreboard
The more you watch the score, the worse you play.
This is obvious in sports, but it is not as evident in other contexts.
An athlete who keeps staring at the scoreboard is no longer fully in the game. Attention drifts from movement, timing, and decision-making toward something they cannot directly control. Performance suffers not from lack of skill, but from misplaced focus.
Yet in everyday work, we do this constantly.
The Seduction of Measurement
Checking progress feels productive.
Refreshing analytics, reviewing metrics, re-reading plans, tracking numbers. These actions create the comforting sensation of engagement. Something is being monitored. Something is being managed.
But most forms of measurement do not move the system forward. They only describe its current state.
The scoreboard is informational, not causal.
Knowing the score does not change the score.
When Monitoring Becomes Interference
Attention is finite. Every glance at the scoreboard consumes cognitive resources that could have gone into execution.
Over time, this creates a subtle but costly shift. Work becomes centered on tracking rather than doing, on interpreting rather than producing.
The irony is that the more uncertain we feel, the more we check and the less we actually influence outcomes.
The Only Question That Matters
There is only one interaction that reliably changes the scoreboard:
What now?
Not “How am I doing?”
Not “Is this working yet?”
Not “Am I ahead or behind?”
But “What is the next concrete action available to me?”
Scoreboards update as a side effect of behavior, never as a result of observation.
Reclaiming Forward Attention
This does not mean measurement is useless. Feedback is essential. Direction matters.
But timing matters just as much.
Measurement helps when it informs decisions. It harms when it replaces them.
The game is played on the field, not on the board.
Final Thought
Progress rarely stalls because people lack information about their performance.
More often, it stalls because attention migrates from action to evaluation, from participation to self-monitoring.
If the score is not changing, the solution is almost never to check it again.
It is to return to the only place where change is possible.
What am I going to do next?
Once you figure that out, everything else follows.