graph of life

Schalk
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Recap: Graph of Life

There is an old saying that you can’t improve something you don’t measure. 

If you measure something, you automatically become more focused on it. You also get immediate feedback to help you quickly correct course when you go off track. 

Consistency is a tricky customer to measure, but the Graph of Life does just that. Since consistency is the underlying enabler of most of the good things life has to offer, measuring it sure is worth your while.

The checklist

So, here is the 1-2-3 of getting you Graph of Life up and running:

  1. Download the Excel template and spend a couple of minutes learning how to use it.
    • The file and a short video tutorial can be found here. 
    • My offer to help you customize it to your particular needs still stands.  
  2. Fill out your Graph of Life first thing each day. It takes less than a minute.
    • Make it a fixed part of your morning routine. 
  3. Use your graph to avoid downwards spirals and accelerate upwards spirals.
    • When you graph starts pointing downwards, do whatever it takes to correct course.
    • When you have an upwards streak going, ride the wave as long as possible. 

There you have it. Simple, but very powerful. Please give it a try!

See you tomorrow for this week’s edition of Amateur Creativity!

Schalk
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A Decade of Tracking Consistency

I started collecting data for my first Graph of Life towards the end of 2009. Back then, consistency was nowhere near the top of my agenda. I just wanted to understand which aspects of my life had the biggest positive or negative impacts. 

The main findings from almost 10 years of data are as follows (more details can be found here): 

  • Healthy eating and exercise really are as important as everyone says. Healthy eating habits affected my life more than any other factor. 
  • Productivity was not far behind. It was particularly interesting how strongly the number of items I ticked off on my to-do list correlated with the overall quality of my day. 
  • My stress levels and my stuttering problem both had surprisingly small influences on the quality of my day. This was a great relief.
  • I tended to have multi-day or even multi-week good or bad spells. Yesterday is a good predictor of what today will look like. 

The last point is particularly important. Positive or negative streaks have disproportionately large impacts. And these streaks can be controlled through things like diet, exercise and to-do listing.

It certainly took me long enough, but this data finally made me appreciate the power of consistency.

My consistency obsession is still less than a year old, but this year’s data already shows wonderful effects. On average, I now get almost twice as much out of every day as I used to. This is a massive improvement!

It’s also the reason I started this blog. This stuff just has to be shared 🙂

The Graph of Life won’t turn every day into sunshine and roses. What it will do though is to quickly bail you out of potential tailspins and cheer you on as you embark on upwards spirals.

It really is very simple: if you spiral up much more than you spiral down, your life will be awesome. 

The Graph of Life can give you that. I really hope you let it 🙂

See you tomorrow for this weeks wrap-up! 

Schalk
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The Consistency Tracker

Yesterday’s post introduced the “Graph of Life” – a great way to measure your consistency in less than one minute every morning.

The simple act of measuring something can lead to significant improvement simply by raising awareness. Thus, even if we disregard any interesting insights it might bring, the Graph of Life still holds great value. 

Getting started with the spreadsheet is the biggest obstacle to this great habit. Thus, I’ve tried to make this first step as simple as possible. Setting this up should take just 5-10 minutes. 

If you have MS Excel, please download the Graph of Life template here and watch the short instructional video below. 

If you don’t have Excel, you can use Google Sheets. In this case, download this file and watch the instructional video below. 

 

Lastly, I want to extend an offer to help you further customize this simple template to better suit your needs. Just email me at mail@schalkcloete.com so that we can set this up. 

All I ask for in return is access to the data you collect. I’m very interested to see whether the links between different aspects of life I reported here are similar for other people. 

Tomorrow, I’ll share a bit more about the insights I gained from my own Graph of Life. See you then!

Schalk
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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!