Do you make time to measure your efforts?
Posted on September 03, 2024 by Tom Brush, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
Why do we do things if we never stop to measure their impact? How can you learn if you don't stop to measure or even see if you are making progress?
I hear it all the time, people saying how important measuring your efforts is, yet so few actually make the time to do it.
Is that you?
When you take an action that is important to yourself or your business do you schedule the time to measure it and learn from it or are you too busy for that?
Maybe you dread those meetings, either with yourself or others, because nothing seems to come from them.
▶️ You or others find the little things that did not go as planned and use them to criticize you.
▶️ All you get is antidotal thoughts about how great it was or all the things that went “wrong”
▶️ You don’t know what to do with the information you get.
It all just seems like a big waste of time.
If that is you, you are missing an opportunity because you are focused on judging either the results or your efforts. Rather than learning from our efforts!
Stop judging and start learning!
Tips to start learning from your efforts
Determine your destination – If you aren’t clear on where you want to be it will be hard to learn from your actions.
Establish clear goals – Once you know your destination identify some SMART goals that are both financial and non-financial. It is great to understand the value our destination is worth as well as the other valuable reasons for trying to get there.
Schedule time to assess – Assessing is hard to do anyway and almost impossible if you don’t schedule time to focus on it. If you don’t schedule it you will likely just move onto the next priority. You have to much going on to just assume it will happen.
Ask these questions – One of the biggest challenges you might have around assessing your efforts is knowing what questions will help you learn and which will head you down the judgement pathway. Don’t ask: what did you think? what went wrong? what could we do better? Those questions lead to judgement. Instead ask: What went well? What did not go as planned? What might I do different? These questions lead toward learning.
Can you see how these steps will help you focus on what you learned instead of a judgement on what you did or your results?
Focus on what you can control – the actions you take – and use the results you get to learn about those actions.
When you learn, it is a lot easier to take the next step!
