You get more of what you measure

The other day I was talking with my wife.

See, we homeschool our kids. Not for any religious reasons or anything… just because we think our school system sorta blows (but that’s another topic for another day, perhaps). And we were talking about ways to improve the homeschooling time.

And I proposed something.

Something that I think applies to all of us.

So, here was my idea…

To create a points system for our kids. Where they will get points for doing certain things during their school day. Things we want them to be doing. Like…

• Looking up a word in the dictionary
• Reading a page of a book
• Scoring well on a quiz (we’d put in specific benchmarks, of course)

… you get the idea. We’d come up with a point system where they know how many points they get for each activity. And they would tally them up as they go through the day to arrive at a number of points for that day.

Then, they GRAPH it. A simple line graph. We’d show them how to do it, of course. But, the whole point here is to get a trend. If we see a trend of points going down, we know something is up and we can figure it out. If we see the trend going upward, we’ll make it worth their while. 🙂

We haven’t implemented this yet, but my thought is that this will accomplish a few things:

• It will turn things we want them to do into measurable items. For instance, we WANT them to learn to use a dictionary to look up words they don’t know rather than just fly past them like most do. So, we make a point about looking up a word.
• It will give them a sense of structure and control over the school day, rather than just “serving their time” until it’s over.
• It will turn it into a game, where they try to outdo themselves.

I think this applies to all of us in life and business, too.

In my Step Into Your A Game course, I actually talked about the use of a daily points system. Now, I can’t say I do it anymore, but I probably should. But, the idea was that I had such a points system for things in my business. Things like:

• Writing a blog post
• Creating a lead magnet
• Creating a video
• Creating a slidedeck
• Setting up an ad.
• Writing an email to my list

Things that wouldn’t get any points would be the stupid crap… like being on Facebook.

It keeps the eye on the ball. It turns it into a game to make your points higher than the day before.

There’s the whole adage in business management which says…

You are what you measure.

I believe this firmly.

If we don’t have any measurement to the things we want, then it is aimless. It is flying by the seat of our pants. And the result will be great intentions, backed up by aimless movement. Result = nothing.

So, here’s an exercise you can do today…

Sure, you can make a whole points system if you want. But, before you do that, you need to know what kinds of actions matter and which don’t.

So, simply make a list of actions you do (or should be doing) for your online business that actually move the needle. If you want, you can even break each one down into smaller items if that makes sense. This blog post has a list of 10 actions which are “high impact” for your business which could be done in less than 30 minutes.

Once you’ve got that, rank them in order of importance. For instance, setting up a Facebook ad is probably going to have more impact than me answering an email.

Anyway…

What do you think?

Do you measure your actions during the day?

– David