Your time starts now: when Taskmaster uses proxy metrics

11 May 2026

Disclaimer: this post is just an excuse to talk about some of my favourite topics: Taskmaster and complaining about metrics pitfalls.

On Friday evenings, I have a ritual. I make a simple egg-based dish, grab a cold beer, and put on an episode of Taskmaster. Currently, I’m re-watching Series 7. While it looks like a comedy show about comedians doing ridiculous things for a golden bust of Greg Davies, a task reminded me of a typical metric pitfall.

The task is from Episode 3, Season 7: “Excite Alex. Greatest increase from Alex’s current heart rate wins. You have 20 minutes. Your time starts now.”

The goal is to excite Alex Horne. Because excitement is a complex and subjective human emotion, the show introduces a proxy metric: heart rate. The moment that heart rate monitor is strapped on, we enter the world of Goodhart’s Law, this is the principle that once a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

In the show, the comedians immediately stop trying to make Alex feel excited. They focus on making his heart pump faster by any means necessary. James Acaster decides a high-speed game of tag in the garden is the answer. Jessica Knappett, who eventually wins the task, simply makes him do a hundred burpees until his heart rate nearly triples. Meanwhile, Phil Wang fails the metric by being too nice. He gives Alex a hot mocha and shows him dashcam footage of near misses. This was so relaxing it caused Alex’s heart rate to drop by six beats. I would argue that the task has been a failure in testing Alex's emotions, even if it succeeded entertaining the public.

This is a perfect illustration of Jerry Muller’s concept of "Metric Fixation." It is the belief that numerical indicators can and should replace human judgment. In this task, the heart rate was a reasonable proxy for physical exertion but a terrible one for an emotional state.

We do this at work constantly. We take an incommensurable goal like educational excellence or innovative research and we start "weighing the pig." This phrase comes from an old agricultural proverb: weighing a pig doesn't make it fatter. You can measure a project every day, but the act of measuring adds no value to the output itself. Frequent measurement often causes harm by diverting energy away from the actual work of feeding the pig. It suggests that if we just find a more accurate scale, the outcomes will naturally improve.

In the corporate world, this manifests as "mathwashing." This process provides a surface of objectivity to processes that are inherently subjective. When leadership tries to understand a project’s progress solely by the number of completed epics or velocity metrics, they ignore the insight that tells a lead when high velocity is actually masking a burnout risk. They lose the flexibility to set aside a rigid rule when the reality of a project makes the metric a lie.

The result is a system ripe for gaming. In Taskmaster, Rhod Gilbert is the king of this. When told to get a ball in a hole in the fewest strokes possible, he realizes the metric doesn't forbid moving the hole. He digs up the hole, puts it in a bucket, and carries it to the ball. It’s a brilliant shortcut, but in a business context, this is called "improving numbers through omission." You hit the target while completely missing the point.

Unless you are the host of a successful tv show, replicated in many countries, it is best to avoid the trap of the proxy metric. Your job shouldn't become a series of burpees just to make a heart rate monitor spike. Talk with Alex, your team, or your stakeholders, collect qualitative feedback, do not just strap a heartbeat monitor and call it a day. Iterate over metrics until they serve the goal, rather than the other way around.

Bosh.

Notes, Sources and Further Reading