Do this one thing and you will definitely make 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.

I, for one, have been wanting to lose some weight for months now and I go to the gym on and off but hardly ever track my progress. I have no idea if I have actually lost some or gained more.

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?

I have a personal scrum with myself on my birthday every year and reflect on the last year and see how I have improved and what I 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 got engaged and will be getting married in December.
• 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?

The personal scrum can also be applied in various time frames. My example above was over the course of a year. Here is another one with a shorter time frame.

I started this blog in August 2009 and it has been one month since then. I aim to document my training notes online and hoping that this will motivate you if you are looking to get SAP training. Since then I have received some very good feedback and this pushes me on to continue this process.

I have decided to walk the walk and track my progress. One way to do this is to increase the number of people subscribed to my blog. So I am putting up a Feedburner widget on the sidebar on the right that tells me how many people are subscribed. Right now, it is 13 people. Together we shall watch this number and I hope it grows. There is no better community than a community of like minds.

If you are one of the 13, thank you very much and I hope you will continue to see me as a good resource for your information.If you are not yet subscribed to my blog, please click here. If you do not know what that means, don’t worry, you are like me a couple of months ago. I will explain, when you subscribe to my blog, you will get any new posts I write delivered right into your feed reader. You can get one here from Google for free. This way you will always be notified if there is new content and you can read it there without actually coming to my website.

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

Tagged as: motivation, Self improvement