What gets measured gets improved

What are you measuring? 

Que smutty jokes!  

Seriously though what are you measuring each month? Each week? Each year? What are you tracking?

Alan Measuring something

One of the most interesting questions I have been exploring this year is "If things continue as they are am I happy with the direction?" 

To be able to answer that question you need to be able to know whether you are going in the right direction or not.  The only way to do this is to measure something...….

What are you measuring each month?

There are quite a few things I measure each and every month that help me to understand if I am on the right path or not. I measure:

• My weight every single week
• My net-worth every month
• My Businesses finances
• I look at our businesses social channels
• Customer retention
• And lots of other things!

What happens if you don't measure

It was a beautiful late summers evening, warm and still light at 8pm.  I was in my late twenties and was playing football (soccer).  I was having the game of my life, dancing around defenders, shooting with a crispness & accuracy, bounding up and down the pitch.  I turned to sprint back after one attack fizzled out and as I turned there was a "pop" behind me.  I fell to the floor in agony. 

It turns out I had ruptured (hospital language for snapped in two!) my Achilles tendon and had 8 weeks on crutches and a long recovery time. I had to stop playing football and exercising but I forgot to stop eating the same volumes.  Encase you didn't know this is a really good recipe for getting fat fast!  

Fast forward a couple of years and this had happened.  I was a big, big, big, fat dude!  My weight had ballooned to over 18 stone and I was getting fatter and fatter. 

I didn't really notice it until I looked back at the photos of my holiday with Katie and was shocked by how large I had got without realising.

Chubby Alan in his late twenties after the injury

This all happened without me really noticing.  I had been sliding in the wrong direction for some time but I didn't really realise and then I woke up one morning and I was fat!  I had not been measuring and didn't know if I was going in the right direction or not. 

Sure there were signs, my clothes got tighter and tighter but these were easy to explain away and ignore.  I sleep walked into fatness. 

I think quite often people sleep walk into disasters without really knowing it is happening.  They don't really notice that things are changing slowly, an extra pound of weight on your belly every month, over spending by a few hundred pounds a month, a relationship getting slightly worse each month and then all of a sudden they wake up on the edge of a disaster without knowing how they got there. 

If you aren't measuring somehow then how do you know if you are going the right direction and how do you realise quick enough to do something about it before it becomes a complete disaster?!

My weight ballooned and ballooned without me noticing until I was a fat 30 something. If I had been measuring as I went along I might have noticed the decline earlier and done something about it!  If you don't know which direction you are moving in how can you do anything about it?

Noticing trends early

Now every week I measure my weight to know whether I am going in the right direction or not.  I measure it Saturday morning same time ever week and I collect the results in a spreadsheet so I can analyse it.  

In January 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia I was doing my annual reflection and noticed the trend of my weight & body fat percentage was going in the wrong direction! This is the graph:

Several things stand out.  Firstly after Christmas 2017 I recovered quickly from the overeating! Although, it always amazes me how much my weight balloons over Christmas!

In the middle of the year we had several trips and then went to a two week financial retreat called FI Chautauqua  in October and the food was too good!  Towards the end of the year my weight quickly went up!  At the low in the year I was 14.8 Stone (94 kilos, 206 pounds) and at the high I was 16.1 stone (102 kilos, 224 pounds) which is way to heavy for me!  My clothes didn't fit properly and I felt uncomfortable!

​If we add a trend line to the graph it really creates an impact!

Then I start to ask the questions "If I continues in the current direction am I happy with where I am going.?"  If you look at that trend line I am headed right back to extremely overweight and fat. This is not where I want to go.  Noticing this at Christmas allowed me to take action before it got really, really bad.  I took action. 

In the first 5 weeks of the year I have lost 4 kilos which is 9 pounds and I am now moving in the right direction.  If I had not been measuring to see this graph I might have slipped the wrong way for another year before truly noticing what is happening. 

​If you are not tracking and measuring how can you do something about it? What get's measured gets improved!

What can you measure?

The question you should ask yourself to uncover what you should measure is "what's important to you?"

What do you value in life?  

My list of things that are important to me include; health; creativity; relationships & love; finances; business; fun and more.  

Some things like fun don't need measuring with a number but it is worth having a monthly check in to ask the question "are we having enough fun in our lives?"

Other things like finance, business and health are easy to measure, track and work out if you are going in the right direction or not.    Here's the list of what Katie and I measure to make sure we are staying on track:

1. Net-worth - most people don't even know what their net worth is let along track it and measure it!  Every month we work out how much we are worth to make sure it is going in the right direction!  If you need help working out your net-worth read this article
2. Expenses - where is our money going?  Ever had the feeling of "where did my money go?" when you reach the end of the month and there is nothing left?  Well there is an answer to that and to find it you need to track your spending.  Pick 7 or 8 categories and start to track your spending. 
3. Body fat percentage - I want to know am I getting fatter or thinner.  I ignore weight because that can be a false measure as I discussed here and I focus on muscle mass and body fat percentage.  I track it each week to see if I am going the right direction
4. Business Sales - how much money is the business bringing in?  What are we selling and what are we projecting to sell in the next year?  Sales are the life blood of your business and if you aren't tracking this and measuring it each month you are heading for disaster
5. Podcast listeners - I have a podcast on Entrepreneurship called Rebel Entrepreneur and I want to know if people are listening, getting value and taking action. I track listeners, subscribers, email list numbers and then have a feedback survey at the end of Season 1 to ask if it works or not
6. PopUp Business School feedback.  I want to know if the work we are doing at PopUp Business School is actually having an impact!  We have put a process in place at the end of every course to capture feedback and then generate a report that we review with our partners.  This helps us all keep on track.  A couple of years ago we started tracking past participants of the course over time and produced the PopUp Impact Report.  If you want to see how we measured our success (or not) then you can view it here: PopUp Business School Impact Reports
7. Profitability - One of my old business mentors used to say "sales are for vanity, profit is sanity".  If you track high how you can push sales without knowing if you are making money or not that is a sure fire way to disaster.  Tracking your levels or profitability after ALL expenses is critical 
8. Sleep - if I am going to have the energy I need to produce a podcast, help run PopUp and write a blog then I am going to need to get good quality sleep.  I track this using my Fitbit which gives me a score for how good my sleep is and tells me how much deep, light and REM sleep I get.  

There are so many thing you could measure which is why I suggest starting with the question "what is important to you?"

One sure fire way to fail at this stuff is to try and start tracking everything at once, make it an onerous task and give up after a few days.  

Start tracking one thing

Pick one thing that is important to you and start tracking it over the next few months, get into the habit of tracking and reviewing and make it something easy and pleasurable to do!

​Katie and I make our monthly finance meetings where we track our net-worth and expenses fun by doing it with a nice breakfast out!  UMMMM, eggs, bacon and an Americano and talking about finances!  It is so much fun. 

Our last finance meeting at Benedict in Berlin! Wow the food and coffee was good!!

Pick one area and start to measure and track.  Review the numbers once every fortnight (2 weeks if you are American) or once a month and ask the question "do I like the direction I am heading?"

What get's measured get's improved

If you can get geeky about this and create an easy way to track the numbers in the area you have decided upon and then review them fortnightly or monthly then you will be amazed and the outcomes. 

Where your focus goes energy flows.  If you focus on your health and improving it then results will follow.  If you focus on your sales numbers and start doing something every day to improve them then it is only a matter of time before results follow. 

Use the numbers to focus your energy and improve the results you are getting in the most important areas of your life.  

Take action

it is all very well knowing this but nothing changes unless you take action.  Get the metaphorical tape measure out and start to measure the numbers that are important to you and reviewing the direction you are going in!

I would love to know what kind of thing you track, if you have found it helps or not, if you used to measure things and stopped?  Thanks for reading my blog and being part of the gang!

If you want the updates on when Katie and I run the next Take Control of your finances course or publish articles etc. then sign up to the mailing list below.  

Have a wonderful week and I am excited to work with you on improving our health, wealth and happiness!

​Alan