How to Graph Your Way to Success
Microsoft Excel is used by almost a billion people, myself included. On average, I spend about one hour per day with this evergreen software, doing typical spreadsheet stuff. But the first minute of my daily Excel experience is dedicated to something else entirely: personal growth.
There may be an app for almost everything, but personal growth is just too complex and specific to the individual to capture in a simple mobile app.
That’s where Excel really shines. With a little bit of upfront tinkering, you can set up a customized spreadsheet that helps you get the most out of life in as little as one minute per day.
I like to call such a spreadsheet a “Graph of Life.” And I’ve been keeping mine for almost a decade.
The Benefits of Keeping a Graph of Life
Daily tracking of your personal growth in Excel brings five great benefits:
1. Awareness and consistency
The awareness created by regular measurement often leads to significant improvement all by itself. A Graph of Life measures your ability to consistently do the right things in life. You can probably imagine that improving this skill will bring you much joy in the years ahead.
2. Early warning system
A run of consecutive bad days can easily trap you in a destructive downward spiral. Your Graph of Life will help you spot such spirals early and motivate you to take corrective action before they gain serious momentum.
3. Motivation to keep growing
A prolonged streak of good days looks very pretty on your Graph of Life. The more it grows, the more motivated you’ll become to sustain it.
4. Insights into what makes you tick
The data from a year of daily growth tracking can tell you a lot about yourself. One of my first Medium articles shared an analysis of seven years’ worth of data that helped me become a much better version of myself.
5. See the real impact of major life changes
If you’ve read this far, it’s safe to say that you are interested in improving your life. Unfortunately, most of your attempts to build a better life will have little or no real impact. But sooner or later, you’ll find one that really works. Your Graph of Life can help you identify these gems much more clearly.
Getting Started
Start by downloading a basic template for your Graph of Life from this post. The linked post also has a 3-minute video tutorial explaining how to get started. For those without access to Excel, there is also a template and instructional video for Google Sheets (free software).
Here are the necessary steps:
- Define some important items you’d like to track. These might include things like Eating Habits, Exercise, Social Interactions, and Work.
- Define a range over which you’d like to score each item every day.
- Create a graph that automatically trends upwards if you have an above-average day and downwards if you have a below-average day. This feature is already implemented in the template in the aforementioned post.
Using Your Graph of Life
Once you have everything set up, it’s time to build the habit of logging your daily performance. And the best way to do this is to incorporate your Graph of Life into a beautifully choreographed morning routine.
It doesn’t take much to establish this habit. Even if you’ve never used a spreadsheet before, the simplicity and utility offered by the Graph of Life will keep you going. Soon enough, taking a minute each morning to score your yesterday will become as natural as brushing your teeth.
Be sure to note down any big events in your life in the “Comments” column of your Graph of Life. At the end of each year, you can invest some time to indicate these events on your graph (as shown above), so you get a clear picture of which events made a lasting difference.
I also recommend starting a new graph every year. A new year presents an opportunity to add new items or to stop tracking items that proved to have little or no influence after your annual data analysis (described below).
Analyzing your Data
A year of daily growth tracking can teach you a lot about yourself. Investing an hour or two at the end of the year to extract these insights can add great value to your life.
The simplest and most valuable way of doing this in Excel is an analysis of the correlations between the different elements you tracked.
To get started, make sure you have access to Excel’s analysis tools. Once you have activated this feature, you can click on the “Data Analysis” button on the far right of the “Data” ribbon and select the “Correlation” tool.
Here is a snapshot of the first month of my 2019 data and the Correlation tool dialogue box. I recommend copying your data into a new sheet so that the top row contains your data labels. Then you can simply select all the data in the “Input Range” and tick the “Labels in First Row” button.
Once this is done, click OK to view your correlations in a new sheet. Try playing around with some of the “Conditional Formatting” options you can find in the “Home” tab to add a splash of color to your correlation matrix.
Positive numbers (green cells) indicate a positive correlation. For example, Cell J11 in the matrix above shows that my Energy is generally high when my Motivation is high. Negative numbers (red cells) indicate a negative correlation. For example, cell D5 shows that the amount of Work (my research job) I do reduces on days I do lots of Extra Work (mostly blogging). Numbers close to zero (yellow cells) show that no clear correlation exists.
The simplest way to show what makes you tick is to plot a column chart of each tracked element’s correlation with your total score for the day (row 12 in the correlation matrix above). In my case, it looks like this:
It only needs one glance at this graph to establish that I should do all I can to maintain healthy eating habits, a high level of control over my daily schedule, and high energy and motivation levels. These actionable insights have greatly improved my life in recent years.
Give it a try!
Go on, take a few minutes to set up your Graph of Life, and give it a chance to become part of your life. If it doesn’t work for you, no worries.
But I’m confident that you’ll develop the intrinsic motivation needed to keep going after only a week or two. If you do, you’d have gained a lifelong ally to keep you on the right track and bless you with invaluable self-knowledge.
