I say "make calm your new KPI" a lot. It's basically my rallying cry at this point. Heck, I even named my podcast that.
But I should probably back up and explain what I actually mean by that, because KPI is one of those terms that gets thrown around constantly in business circles and can mean everything or nothing depending on who's using it.
So let's just start there.
A KPI (key performance indicator) is basically just a thing you measure to tell you whether you're making progress toward a goal you care about. That's it. It's a signal. A way of asking "is this actually working?" and getting an answer that's more useful than gut feeling alone.
The reason KPIs matter is simple: what you measure shapes what you pay attention to, what you prioritize. If you're tracking revenue growth every week, you're going to make decisions that protect revenue growth. If you're tracking team headcount, you're going to make decisions that justify adding headcount. The metrics you choose don't just reflect your priorities... they create them.
Which is why the metrics most of us are using are kind of a problem.
Here's something worth sitting with: the KPIs on your dashboard right now... did you actually choose them? Or did you just start measuring them because that's what someone told you business owners were supposed to measure?
For most of us, it's that second one. We inherited our metrics the same way we inherited everything else about how to run a business. From the culture around us, from what other people in our industry, from some implicit agreement that these are the numbers that matter. Nobody sat us down and explained why. We just absorbed them. Defaulted into them. Started managing toward them without ever asking whether they were pointing us somewhere we actually wanted to go.
Take headcount. A lot of agencies and SaaS companies track number of employees or number of hires as a success metric. It shows up in case studies, in funding announcements, in how people talk about growth. "We grew from 5 to 50 people in two years." It sounds like success. But headcount isn't tied to profitability. It's not tied to sustainability. It's not tied to whether the business is actually working better. It might even be pushing you to hire more than you need, which adds cost and complexity and management overhead... and now you're managing toward a metric that's actively making your business harder to run.
That's not a hypothetical. That's what default metrics do.
There's a quote that gets misattributed to Peter Drucker constantly, "what gets measured gets managed." People use it as a case for tracking more things. But the actual, fuller version of the idea, from Simon Culkin, is a lot more honest:
"What gets measured gets managed — even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so."
That second part is the part nobody talks about. We're not just measuring things and managing toward them. We're measuring things that might be completely pointless for our specific business or actively working against what we're trying to build... and then managing toward those anyway. Because they're on the dashboard. Because that's what we're "supposed" to do.
Default metrics push you toward a default business. If you want something different, you need to measure something different.
So here's the argument: if calm is your north star, your metrics need to point there.
But calm feels like it shouldn't be a metric. It's a vibe, not a number. You can't put calm in a spreadsheet. You can't set a revenue target for calm.
Except... you kind of can. Not calm itself, but the signals that tell you you're moving toward it. And that's actually how all useful KPIs work. You identify what you're trying to achieve, figure out what indicators would tell you you're heading in the right direction, and build a system around those signals.
Here's what that actually looks like in practice.
Kendall Cherry is a ghostwriter who runs a one-woman content agency. Her calmer KPI is called Fresh Content Inked. The goal: write six or fewer new pieces of content per month. That's it. A ceiling, not a floor.
When she first told me this, I loved it, because it completely inverts the default content logic. The default says more content equals more visibility equals more clients. Kendall asked "what would happen if I just... didn't?" She spent one late night combing through three years of her best content, built an 83-page library of market-validated pieces that her VA now schedules and recycles, and stopped writing new content for almost everything except her weekly newsletter. She doubled her income that year. She started writing a book on the side. She had, in her words, "way more spaciousness."
The metric isn't tracking output. It's actively capping it → because the goal isn't more content, it's more creative margin. And because she's measuring it, she's protecting it.
That's a calmer KPI.
Mine, for 2024, was twelve weeks off. Fully off, not available, not checking in. Simple to track, surprisingly hard to protect, and a direct signal that the business was designed to run without me in it constantly. I ended up taking thirteen weeks. I went for sixteen weeks in 2025, and I'm on track for about the same in 2026.
Layla Pomper tracks what she calls a death list - a running count of people she'd trust her partner to call if something happened to her tomorrow. It sounds morbid. It's actually one of the most practical resilience metrics I've come across, because it forces you to treat community building as infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have. When the list felt thin, she changed how she spent her time. Her KPI changed her behavior. That's how you know it's working.
Karen Sargent does a weekly client report card - ten criteria, five-point scale, tracked every single week. Her metric isn't revenue or retention. It's: am I happy, engaged, and generous with this person? When the answer starts slipping, she addresses it before it becomes a thing. The report card doesn't just measure the health of the relationship. It engineers it.
None of those are conventional KPIs. None of them would show up on a default business dashboard. But all of them are measuring real movement toward a calmer business. And because they're being tracked, they're being prioritized.
Here's what I want to be clear about: I'm not saying throw out your financial metrics. You need those. Profit margins are non-negotiable, and I say that as someone who spent years as a CFO. But they're not sufficient. A business can be financially healthy and completely unsustainable, and the profit line won't tell you that.
If calm is what you're actually designing for, your metrics need to point there. Figure out what signals would tell you your business is getting calmer. What would it look like if you were heading in the right direction? What would you notice first?
Those signals are your calmer KPIs. Build a system around them. Track them with the same consistency you'd track revenue or profit or churn.
Calm doesn't show up by accident. It doesn't show up because you're hoping for it between projects. It shows up because you're measuring for it. Because you decided it was worth designing toward, and then built the signals to tell you whether you're getting there.
Want to go deeper?
The Calm KPIs podcast series goes behind the scenes of real businesses and the specific, sometimes unconventional things they actually measure. A few worth starting with:
