Practical tool: How to measure your work efficiently

To measure your work is probably the most important requirement when it comes to making sure your efforts are allocated to the right type of activity.

If you don’t measure your work, you’ll never know if and when you’re going to get the things you’re working for. And that is what you want, right?

You want to know when you’re going to be able to buy the desire house. You want to know when you’re going to be able to take a one-year break and travel the world. You want to know when you’re going to be able to publish the book you’re currently writing.

If you don’t measure, you’ll lack the clarity of knowing where you are.

If you don’t know where you are, you’ll find it impossible to find practical ways of going where you want to be.

For a second, let’s assume you struggle with losing weight.

If you don’t measure how many calories has the food you’re eating, you may never get to the desired weight.

The same goes not only for the number of calories you have to burn, but also for the progress you’re making. If you don’t know how much weight you’re losing every month, the only measurement you’ll have will be the feeling you get from trying to lose weight.

While that feeling is going to be amazing when you’ll see yourself thinner in the mirror, at first you’ll feel really bad because of the limitations you’ll have to bear when it comes to eating the food you’re not used with.

You have to measure your work if you want to evaluate your progress

There’s no way you’ll be able to properly evaluate your work if there’s no measurement available.

Let’s say you start training for a marathon.

Finishing a marathon and getting that medal requires you to run for 42.2 KM (or 26.2 miles). If you don’t measure your work, after three months of training you may only be at the mark of 10 KM. Is that enough for running a marathon?

It depends. If your whole training period is supposed to last for 3 months and right after that you have to go and run the marathon, I’ll doubt you’ll be able to with a 3-month training where 10 KM was your longest run.

On the other hand, if your whole training period is supposed to last for 9 months, then you still have time to reach to that 30 KM mark as a part of your training, that’s required to run a marathon.

If you don’t measure, there’s nothing to evaluate.

And yes, running a marathon is not something required for survival. If you don’t finish your first marathon, you’ll always have the opportunity to run another one.

But that doesn’t usually happen in our day-to-day lives.

Imagine having a job where your boss is really strict about the goals and deadlines. Most of the bosses out there are like that. If you don’t measure your work, you’ll never be able to achieve those goals, especially when the goals are set in a way that requires high performance.

Even more, it’s important to know how to measure your work, and we’ll talk about this a bit later.

But to give you a taste of what it means to efficiently measure your work, let’s say you have to get 100 new clients in the next three months and 30 of them have to be recurring clients for at least 6 months.

If, after 9 months, you get to achieve these exact number, then it means you’re doing well. But are you doing well enough?

In case you only measure how many new clients the business got in the first three months and how many of them become recurring clients for at least 6 months, then you’ll be all right but you won’t be what the industry considers a high performer.

Instead, there are other things you have to take a good look at, things like what these recurring clients are doing (their behavior), how you can engage with them in order to keep them there (your actions to motivate their behavior), and how you can use the services and products of your business in order to make them feel rewarded for their behavior.

We’ll discuss more about all these inside the tool. Therefore, see you inside.

This tool will help you

1. Learn about the importance of KPIs and see how they impact your mindset.
2. Learn how to find the right KPIs for whatever you’re working on so you can better measure and evaluate your work.