Improvement: one thing that definitely make you progress

How do you know if you are making progress? How do you know if you have improved in your life, career or business over the last week, month or year. To know if something today is better than yesterday, is if you know the state at which it was yesterday and compare it with today.

You need to track or measure the status of play now at this moment to have any chance of knowing if it has improved tomorrow. Gleb Reys on his blog also went further to say “That which is measured, improves” This might sound like basic common sense but you will be surprised at what we don’t track.

Tracking is effective because it gives you that feel good factor of seeing that you are achieving what you have set out to do and gives you motivation to continue. On the other hand, when you see that you are not achieving the goals you have set out for yourself, you tend to give yourself a call to action to get back on the right track.

There is a useful practice in the Agile community called the scrum, where people working on a project gather together and answer three questions

• What did I do yesterday?
• What am I going to do today?
• Are there any problems I am facing to stop me from achieving that task?

Write a personal scrum with yourself on birthday every year and reflect on the last year and see how I have improved and what you can do better. If you can write this down, the better your chances of succeeding. This is the same concept used in gratitude journals, and yes there’s an app for that. It is called Gratitude Journal available on the iPhone.

The more interesting thing is that this will work over different time spans. In the example above, I have a checkpoint every year and on my birthday this year, this was my personal scrum

What have I achieved this year?

• I started a new job

What do I plan to achieve next year?

• I plan to get SAP BI training and become a SAP certified consultant
• My fiance and I plan to buy a house we can call ours

Are there any problems I am facing?

• Apart from the challenges of getting trained, passing the certification, saving enough money? Not at all :-).

Wow, that was a lot of personal information shared but anyway it had be done. What is your personal scrum?

Hope this blog post has pushed you to track your progress. Have a nice day ahead!