I’m participating in a program at my gym. For 6 weeks, every day my goal is to walk 10,000 steps. Different activities translate into a number of steps per minute. My routine varies from day to day. Some days I am dancing. On others, I take yoga, Pilates, a combination of strength and sculpting, and of course, one of my new favorites, salsa.
What You Can Measure, You Can Manage
I work out consistently and frequently. What has changed with the addition of the pedometer is my focus on reaching my goal, 10,000 steps every day. As Buckminster Fuller said “What you can measure, you can manage.” I was surprised to see just how many of my current activities translate into this fitness goal. On several days I have exceeded by more than half the number of steps in my target. What I didn’t expect, I found myself looking for more opportunities to be in motion. All because I am wearing a pedometer.
In school, students are measured: attendance, turning in assignments, completing projects, social skills. In business, our performance is reviewed by our customers, our peers, and are managers. Stating the outcome we want and measuring our actions and results against the desired outcome, gives us the information we need to know to evaluate our actions compared to our intentions.
The very act of stating a goal, measuring progress, and being mindful of your goal, can help put you into action. In another area of my life, writing my book on marketing, I made a comment error. Even though I am working with a coach to help me build out my book, I neglected to write down my goals with dates and I didn’t make appointments to do the writing. I’m driven to take action when I have items in my calendar. This oversight putting back several weeks. When I met with my coach, I realized my error and I have now corrected it by putting time to work on my book in my schedule, a repeating event with alerts is now active on my calendar.
Planning your actions helps you reach your goal. Measuring your activities is a way to remind yourself, and reward yourself, for staying on track. Measuring and documenting your actions can also reveal what is getting in your way and give you a place to take corrective action.
A simple way to track your actions might be to make notes in your calendar. Of course, there’s an app for that too. Here are a few apps that can help you without taking up too much time and they are fun to use.
Evernote
It’s a free tool that I have installed on my computer, my iPhone, and my iPad. It lives in the cloud and syncs between all my smart devices. Tim Ferriss used it to write his most famous work, The 4-hour Work Week, and The 4-hour Body. It’s a great tool for writers, business owners, students, anyone who wants to keep track of information, websites, and organize the data. You can clip URLs, articles, and entire webpages with ease. You can create separate notebooks within Evernote. You can add tags, notes, voice annotations, photos, and you can even e-mail right from the program. There is a paid version of the program, most users will be satisfied with the free version. Check it out at http://www.evernote.com
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management app that works on smart phones and computers (Mac and PC). You can ask it to remind you with alerts, e-mail reminders. You can create multiple lists, and like Evernote, sync your lists to your various devices via the cloud.
Google Docs
You can create a spreadsheet to track your actions and if you have others on your team, you can grant access to your Google Docs easily.
Dropbox
Is another cloud service where you can share documents on file by file basis. If you’re working with a coach, or other team members, putting your documents into dropbox allows sharing and editing with the people you grant access. To sign up for Dropbox, click here.
Tools You Can Use
I invite you to give these tools a try. They are free. Pick a project you want to complete and see how these tools help you succeed. You may be surprised to see how measuring what you do will help you do what you want to measure.
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