Track Your Progress With Spreadsheets

There's no point in doing increasing amounts of work without measuring the results. Why would you spin your wheels without figuring out a way to analyze what’s working and what’s not? If you analyze your own time, you might find that about 30% of what you do really matters, 30% might matter, and 30% is completely worthless. The key is finding out which of your efforts are producing big results. One quantifiable way to do that is with spreadsheets.

Steps

  1. Decide what you're going to track. You can probably capture 90% of the bare necessities if you track just these things:
    • What categories you spend money on (and how much)
    • How many calories you eat
    • How often you work out
  2. Pick a place to track your progress. For money, you can use any personal-finance software (Mint, Quicken, or Excel). For anything else, another option is to create a free password-protected PBwiki. You’ll be able to type in your progress from anywhere you have Internet access.
    • Use public commitment to maximize your chances of success. Let's say you bet your friends $225 that you can gain 15lbs in 3 months, you can invite them all to a wiki and update it every week. This can be incredibly motivational to you: The money is nice, but you won't want to publicly lose after posting your progress for all those weeks.
  3. Pick one thing to track and do it for four weeks.
  4. Use the "Think, Want, Do" technique. Let’s use monthly spending as an example.
    • First, write down what you think you spend.
    • Second, write down what you want to spend.
    • Third, write down what you actually spend. (This is where you track it and add it daily.)
    • Compare the “actual” chart to the other charts. The numbers may stun you.

Tips

  • The most important thing is to start tracking today. The point isn’t to set up the fanciest tracking system. It’s to learn from the results and change your behavior. Aim for the most lightweight system you can create. Forget being perfect. Just get started today.
  • Don’t worry about making the data structured so you can sort/analyze it. After a month of data, you can have a virtual admin go through it and analyze it, if you really need to. It might cost you about $20 to have it professionally restructured and analyzed.

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References

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