Alan Porter, our VP of Operations, likes to count things. Counting things helps him in his day-to-day job.

– How many Support requests have we handled this week?
– What is our average close time for Support cases?

You can imagine.

During RoundUp, Alan taught me a brand new metric:

The Doodle Metric

Now, as I watched Alan slip in and out of presentations, I just thought he was counting the number of people present and subtracting out the nodding heads. When I asked him about it later, he said:

I wasn’t counting people. I was counting doodles.

Of course! Instead of trying to measure someone’s interest in the speaker directly, see how much effort they direct away from the speaker.

So there you have it. Alan Porter is the founding father of Doodle Metrics.

BTW: By all reports, RoundUp had a very low doodle metric index.