What we measure, we improve.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? What we measure, we improve. What we track, we are aware of. Everything else is vague and general feelings that are easy to manipulate inside our minds with our biases or what we want to have actually done.

[00:00:41] That's something I've been thinking about a little bit today. One of the reasons that I have been able to do this podcast every single day is because it is so easy to track. It's easy to see that I've published an episode every single [00:01:00] day. I can log into my podcasting platform and see that I have something scheduled for every single day since I started.

[00:01:11] It's not about the result, right? In this case, what is the result? I mean, there is a daily result of publishing a podcast episode, but what is the end goal? That's not what it's about. It's about the fact that whatever you track, you are so deeply aware of. You know, for example, when you track how many workouts you've done in a week, that's easy to see.

[00:01:40] It's objective, it's right there in front of your face. So when you're aware of it, you also in some way create motivation in yourself to get better at it or to keep it up, right? We all love a good streak, We all love not breaking the chain. [00:02:00] You know, that comes from Seinfeld's strategy. Don't break the chain.

[00:02:05] And sometimes it is hard to figure out what to track. Not everything is so easily trackable. For example, love might be important to you. Loving your partner may be important to you, but how do you measure it? How do you track it? In that case, you're not measuring or tracking the idea. You're measuring and tracking how you put that idea in practice.

[00:02:32] For example, maybe you can track how many date nights you have. Maybe your goal is to have two date nights a month, right? You can track that or maybe your goal is to tell your partner something you love about them every single day. You can track that. How do you measure, you know, if you are living your life in a [00:03:00] meaningful manner? Well, you figure out what gives your life meaning, how that translates into practice.

[00:03:07] And then you can track that practice. So in that same way with job, work with projects that we want to accomplish. We need to figure out what we can track, what is a meaningful metric that we can figure out and keep track of. If we figure that out, we do help ourselves become better at doing that thing because what we measure, we improve.

[00:03:36] There are vanity metrics. You know, for example, a vanity metric with the podcast would be how many downloads each episode gets. That's a useful metric in some way, but there's a limit to that because there's only so much I can do about its growth, especially when I'm not super focused on the marketing.

[00:03:56] So it's more important in my case, right, to [00:04:00] track how many days I actually recorded a podcast episode. My metric is, did I do one today? Every single day? That's the more important metric. That is going to be the thing that keeps me improving and keeps me up on my game. So look at the things you want to accomplish and figure out a meaningful metric that gives you meaningful feedback.

[00:04:26] On a regular basis, figure out what that is and track that, right? If you have a reading habit, track how many days you read, how many pages per day you read. Track the meaningful metric so that you can improve in a meaningful way. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.