Want to Improve Something? Measure It!
This blog is all about the superpower of consistency. This superpower can truly enrich your life and the lives of those you care about, but it continues to elude most of us.
One important reason for this inconsistency is that consistency is hard to measure. Yes, the results of consistency (weight, fitness, wealth, productive outputs, etc.) are simple enough to measure, but the problem is that these results only come after months or even years of consistent good or bad actions.
Humans are notoriously bad with delayed gratification. We want to see progress now! If we don’t, we easily get discouraged and quit before we gave ourselves a fair chance to achieve real results.
This week, we’ll discuss a tool for measuring consistency directly. I like to call it the “Graph of Life” and it has the power to greatly improve your consistency.
So, let’s get started…
Monday 5-minute action Get started with your own Graph of Life
The tricky thing is that there is not yet an app for making a good Graph of Life. Thus, we’ll need to do some spreadsheeting using MS Excel or Google Sheets.
An Excel template for your own Graph of Life can be downloaded here. Click on this link if you have MS Excel. If not, click on this link for a version suitable for Google Sheets.
Don’t worry If you have no experience with spreadsheets. You don’t need to insert formulas or anything like that. All you need is one minute to insert a couple of 0-10 scores every morning.
Thus far, I’ve asked a couple of family members to try out the Graph of Life. Their experience shows that, if you manage to get past the initial resistance to getting started, the data you collect becomes so interesting that you’ll have no problems maintaining this habit.
So, please push through this initial resistance to download the file and try it out. The sheet should be quite intuitive to use and also contains some user guidelines to help you along.
To make it even easier, tomorrow’s post will give a short video tutorial. See you then!