For several weeks, Chad and I had a recurring conversation.
It usually went something like this:
“Okay, this has to be it.”
Followed, approximately 24 hours later, by:
“Never mind. That doesn’t make any sense.”
If you read my last article, you know I unexpectedly became my own IT department after discovering that my home internet usage had gone through the roof. One day alone registered 224 GB—nearly half of what I had used during an entire previous month.
I work from home. I teach virtual classes. I’m on Zoom. I stream television. I use ChatGPT and Canva. I’m online a lot.
So there were plenty of perfectly reasonable explanations.
The problem was that the data kept refusing to cooperate with them.
I teach classes on GoToWebinar, sometimes for several hours a day. That seemed like an obvious culprit.
Except I could teach for hours and have a relatively low-usage day.
Okay. Not that.
Maybe it was one of my Macs.
I installed Little Snitch on both computers so I could see which applications and processes were actually connecting to the internet.
Plenty of activity.
Nothing that explained 100+ GB disappearing in a day.
Okay. Not that.
Maybe Cox was measuring incorrectly.
I asked them to audit my data usage.
They did.
According to Cox, their numbers were accurate.
I couldn’t independently verify their audit, of course, but at some point you have to decide whether you’re going to work with the information you have or keep arguing with it.
Okay. Keep looking.
Then there was the Amazon Fire Stick.
I hadn’t been using it, yet Cox’s Panoramic WiFi app sometimes showed it active for 17 hours a day.
Seventeen hours.
At one point I told Chad:
“The TV wasn’t even on.”
That seemed suspicious.
Except we eventually realized that “active time” and “using massive amounts of data” aren’t necessarily the same thing.
The Fire Stick remains a person of interest. No charges have been filed.
Then we turned our attention to my iPhone.
This was where the investigation got uncomfortable.
I turned off Wi-Fi on my phone.
Not for an hour.
Not for an afternoon.
For more than a week.
If you’re thinking, “That’s not a big deal. Just use cellular data,” I invite you to try it.
My morning DarrenDaily video didn’t stream the way I was accustomed to.
Normal things on my phone felt slower.
And, perhaps most tragically, even a perfectly respectable TikTok doom-scrolling session required more patience than I was prepared to give it.
I was inconveniencing myself on purpose because we needed to isolate a variable.
And then something happened.
My home internet usage dropped.
Interesting.
Not proof.
But interesting.
Then we looked at my iPhone’s cellular data.
Google Photos had used more than 40 GB.
Forty gigabytes.
While I had been deliberately keeping my phone off my home Wi-Fi to determine whether the phone might be contributing to my Cox usage, Google Photos had apparently decided cellular data would do just fine.
“Chad, I think we found something.”
Maybe.
Because that’s another lesson this experience has reinforced:
Interesting evidence isn’t the same thing as a conclusion.
Forty gigabytes was a lead, not a verdict, so before we declared victory we needed to understand why.
We started watching Google Photos more closely.
It was trying to back up videos from years ago.
One was a 45-minute video from earlier this year that repeatedly appeared in the backup queue. I eventually deleted it after confirming I had another copy.
Then a random photo from October 2025 suddenly appeared as needing backup.
I hadn’t edited it.
I hadn’t opened it.
I hadn’t done anything to it.
A few minutes later, Google successfully backed it up and moved on.
So, have we solved the mystery?
I don’t know.
And that’s the point.
In leadership, we often have a story before we have enough evidence.
Sales are down because the team isn’t prospecting.
Turnover is up because people don’t want to work anymore.
A high performer is disengaged because she didn’t get the promotion.
The project is behind because one person isn’t pulling his weight.
Maybe.
But what happens when the data doesn’t match the story?
Too often, we defend the story.
We explain away the inconvenient number.
We find another metric.
We blame the measurement.
Or we selectively notice the evidence that supports what we already believed.
There’s another option.
Get curious about the gap.
Maybe the data is wrong.
Maybe you’re measuring the wrong thing.
Maybe you don’t understand what the metric actually represents.
Maybe several small things are creating one large result.
Or maybe the explanation you’ve been absolutely certain about simply isn’t true.
That’s why this experience has reminded me that good decision-making isn’t simply about collecting more data.
It’s about being willing to let the data change your mind.
I’m still monitoring my internet usage.
I’m keeping a rough record of what I do each day.
I’m watching Google Photos.
I’m comparing heavy teaching days with ordinary workdays.
And I’m resisting the temptation to declare the case closed simply because the numbers have improved.
Because sometimes the most useful thing data can tell us isn’t the answer.
It’s that we’ve been asking the wrong question.
When the data doesn’t match the story, don’t force the data to fit.
Investigate the gap.
I coach and consult with leaders on exactly this kind of thing — not internet bills, but the stories we tell ourselves when the evidence doesn’t cooperate.
