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Tom Cochran\u2019s experiment yielded an interesting result about the literal cost of a seemingly harmless behavior. But the real importance of this story is the experiment itself, and in particular, its complexity. It turns out to be really difficult to answer a simple question such as: What\u2019s the impact of our current e-mail habits on the bottom line? Cochran had to conduct a company-wide survey and gather statistics from the IT infrastructure. He also had to pull together salary data and information on typing and reading speed, and run the whole thing through a statistical model to spit out his final result. And even then, the outcome is fungible, as it\u2019s not able to separate out, for example, how much value was produced<\/em> by this frequent, expensive e-mail use to offset some of its cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This example generalizes to most behaviors that potentially impede or improve deep work. Even though we abstractly accept that distraction has costs and depth has value, these impacts, as Tom Cochran discovered, are difficult to measure. This isn\u2019t a trait unique to habits related to distraction and depth: Generally speaking, as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual\u2019s efforts. The French economist Thomas Piketty made this point explicit in his study of the extreme growth of executive salaries. The enabling assumption driving his argument is that \u201cit is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm\u2019s output.\u201d In the absence of such measures, irrational outcomes, such as executive salaries way out of proportion to the executive\u2019s marginal productivity, can occur. Even though some details of Piketty\u2019s theory are controversial, the underlying assumption that it\u2019s increasingly difficult to measure individuals\u2019 contributions is generally considered, to quote one of his critics, \u201cundoubtedly true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We should not, therefore, expect the bottom-line impact of depth-destroying behaviors to be easily detected. As Tom Cochran discovered, such metrics fall into an opaque region resistant to easy measurement\u2014a region I call the metric black hole<\/em>. Of course, just because it\u2019s hard to measure metrics related to deep work doesn\u2019t automatically lead to the conclusion that businesses will dismiss it. We have many examples of behaviors for which it\u2019s hard to measure their bottom-line impact but that nevertheless flourish in our business culture; think, for example, of the three trends that opened this chapter, or the outsize executive salaries that puzzled Thomas Piketty. But without clear metrics to support it, any business behavior is vulnerable to unstable whim and shifting forces, and in this volatile scrum deep work has fared particularly poorly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n