What gets measured gets managed.
Peter Drucker
Like it or not, you’re managing your personal growth. And you’re either doing it well or doing it poorly. Only you can say which. But if you don’t have a way to measure your growth, how do you know how well you’re managing it?
Goals, Tasks, Etc.
Writing down and monitoring goals is one way to tell how well you’re doing. But many goals are long-term in nature. It can be a year or more before you achieve a goal, and that’s much too long to wait for feedback.
Another way people measure themselves is by how many projects are completed or how many tasks are checked off their to-do lists. While that can provide some feedback, there’s a problem with that approach: not all the feedback is useful.
Unless the tasks and projects you’re checking off your lists are ones you put there to serve your most important goals—they’re not measuring your growth. Instead, they’re just measuring your efficiency—how much you can get done in the least amount of time.
And while it’s helpful to be efficient, it’s not helpful to be efficient at things that aren’t worth doing. If the tasks and projects you’re efficiently checking off your lists aren’t serving your goals, you need to reconsider whether that constitutes growth or not.
It very likely doesn’t. At best, it gets you to keep on taking on more work that isn’t necessarily worth your time and attention in the long term.
Scoring Yourself
That’s why The Today System revolves around a score. And that score isn’t just an arbitrary number—like the quantity of items you completed. The score is designed to reflect your priorities.
The more important an item is relative to the other ones on your card each day, the more points it’s worth. You decide the point values, because you decide what’s important to you.
If you consistently score below a .750 (or 75%) each day, that’s helpful feedback. It may mean that however many tasks you’re getting done, you’re not working on the ones that matter.
It may also mean that you’re getting the most important (i.e. biggest point value) items done, but you’ve neglected the lower value ones. While that’s how it should be, if there are too many low value items not getting done, it means you’re overcommitting.
More Than Just a Number
But the score itself is just one part of the feedback you should pay attention to. You also need to pay attention to your own feelings about how well you’re doing managing your growth.
If you find that you’re getting a great score each day (i.e., .750 or more), but you don’t feel like you’re making progress on important things—that’s important to note. It means you need to spend more time thinking about your goals and how the work on your plate relates to them (or, likely, doesn’t). It may also mean that you just need to take more time deciding what goes on your card each day, and what point value it gets.
The score is basically a mirror. It reflects whatever you put in front of it. If you show it a half-hearted, unthoughtful hodgepodge of items you kind of want to do today, that’s all the score will tell you at the day’s end.
But if you put thought into it, and fill out your card with items that serve your major goals, that score will tell you how good you are at living intentionally. And depending on what your score is, you know the adjustments you need to make.
Daily and Dynamic Feedback
The score is daily feedback. It’s also dynamic feedback—in that it adjusts to your values in real time. Each day’s score is a reflection of the thought you put into your game plan for that day. So it’s worthwhile to both spend time and energy deciding what goes on your card each day, as well as time and energy reflecting on what your score is telling you.
Feedback loops are the key to personal growth. But they have to be consistent and informative. So take the time today to both fill out your card, and reflect on your score. You’ll be glad you did.
