I ask at the beginning of almost every conversation “what’s your default plan? what would you do if we wouldn’t talk today?”, and in most conversations I ask once or twice later “what’s your default plan now?”
To be clear, my standard of “made a difference” is something like “[expect to have] saved a few months of the career of the person”
Almost all my conversations are recorded and also in a Google Doc, which means
I can go over my own work (in practice I only did this once, when I had a small breakdown and thought I’m maybe deluding myself, so I went over lots of calls)
It’s ready for a 3rd party to do an impact analysis on my work
I think this has a psychological effect on me, somewhat thinking what someone else would say about this
I sometimes ask for (or spontaneously get) feedback after the call, mostly in the comments to one of my posts
In about half the calls I ask for feedback at the end of the call (and I don’t take anything vague like “this was useful” as an indication of impact, only things like “this is where I changed my plan”)
I think I “should” do (I’d do this if I had more resources, or a 3rd party interested)
Tidy impact analysis, going over my calls, contacting people I spoke to, more similar to what 80k do
The crazy version here is a RCT. I specifically expect my CV exercise might get impressive results in raising people’s salary if someone would run an RCT on it
The thing that changed my mind during the small-breakdown and got me to believe that yes, I’m useful:
Specific stories of pretty big impact that people told me about months after speaking to me. Here’s one I got yesterday by surprise and made me really happy, even trying hard to analyze counterfactuals which I really appreciate
Things I do to measure myself:
I ask at the beginning of almost every conversation “what’s your default plan? what would you do if we wouldn’t talk today?”, and in most conversations I ask once or twice later “what’s your default plan now?”
To be clear, my standard of “made a difference” is something like “[expect to have] saved a few months of the career of the person”
Almost all my conversations are recorded and also in a Google Doc, which means
I can go over my own work (in practice I only did this once, when I had a small breakdown and thought I’m maybe deluding myself, so I went over lots of calls)
It’s ready for a 3rd party to do an impact analysis on my work
I think this has a psychological effect on me, somewhat thinking what someone else would say about this
I sometimes ask for (or spontaneously get) feedback after the call, mostly in the comments to one of my posts
In about half the calls I ask for feedback at the end of the call (and I don’t take anything vague like “this was useful” as an indication of impact, only things like “this is where I changed my plan”)
I think I “should” do (I’d do this if I had more resources, or a 3rd party interested)
Tidy impact analysis, going over my calls, contacting people I spoke to, more similar to what 80k do
The crazy version here is a RCT. I specifically expect my CV exercise might get impressive results in raising people’s salary if someone would run an RCT on it
The thing that changed my mind during the small-breakdown and got me to believe that yes, I’m useful:
Specific stories of pretty big impact that people told me about months after speaking to me. Here’s one I got yesterday by surprise and made me really happy, even trying hard to analyze counterfactuals which I really appreciate