The Data Doesn't Lie
Part 2 of a 2-part article that will help you identify the value of self-assessment and how to build powerful tools that will accelerate your progress toward any goals.
In Part 1 of this article, I introduced why self-assessment is important. If you haven’t read that yet, jump over there for a few minutes, then come back.
In this second part, we’ll get more specific on the tactics used to assess key areas of your life. Your assessments will guide you to the exact actions you can take to get what you really want.
One thing to think about before you dive in: You’re embarking on a new habit. You should know by now that you’re going to feel a massive amount of resistance to this new set of behaviors. Your mind will feed you multiple reasons why you shouldn’t do this. The most common conscious response will be:
“I don’t have time for this!”
The subconscious truth is something like this:
“I’m afraid to pull back the curtain on the reality of my life, because I’m terrified of what I might see. It might make me feel bad or show me where I need to level up, and it will almost certainly reveal that I have a lot of work to do. I’d rather just cruise and feel like I’m fine, rather than act to make my life exactly what I want.”
This is simply Fear trying keep you from examining where you really are in life. It knows that once you start paying close attention to what’s really important, you’re going to face change.
If there’s one thing Fear cannot stand, it’s change.
Before you go any further, ask yourself a few questions:
If I find out that I have ways to improve, am I willing to understand them and act on them?
Am I willing to face my fears?
Am I willing to take control over the loose ends in my life so I can make myself as powerful as possible?
Am I willing to examine my life in this moment and recognize my shortcomings without judging myself?
Am I willing to do what’s right for me, regardless of social and environmental pressures that want me to stay the same?
Am I willing to take on new possibilities, knowing they demand more responsibilities?
Answering “yes” to these questions is your ticket to the life you want.
I know you’ll go for it.
Capturing self-assessment data
Like writing up a new workout routine or creating a budget, you need to write down what you’re actually going to do. This becomes your Personal Assessment Guide.
I recommend doing this with a good ol’ spreadsheet. But, you could do it with a notebook or a progress tracking app. Pick whatever has the least barriers of entry for you.
As you work through the assessment categories in this article, you’ll follow the same process:
Identify the areas in life that you want to assess.
See list below as a starting point.
Determine the metrics. Each category has its own.
Make sure you fundamentally understand the metrics. The assessment details below will help you get started.
Log the metrics as you go through life.
Your self-assessment is only as powerful as your data and your honesty in reviewing the data. Capture it and don’t lie to yourself!
Set the time frames for analyzing the metrics.
Ranges from daily to every couple months.
Determine actions.
Use the data to inform your next actions. This is your ticket to becoming powerful.
Self-assessment data segments
We’ll start with five of the most important elements in your life: Time, Health, Finances, Relationships, and Professional Roles.
If you’re just starting out, and the thought of assessing your entire life is daunting, then just start with Time. You’ll be amazed how much clarity it provides, and you’ll be excited to add to it.
Time
Time is truly the fundamental resource. You lose it when you die. Otherwise, in some form or another, you’re using this resource whether you want to or not. It’s critical that you clearly understand where you’re spending your time. Most of us are floating from one emotional response to another, without a clear understanding of where our time goes.We arrive at every evening wondering where yet another day went. We constantly feel behind or under the pressure of tasks and schedules. This process will help you break free from this pattern.
Time Blocks
Log each day from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. At first, this will be messy. The categories and labels below will help you get organized.
Time Categories
Personal, professional, relationship, daily practices, errands, home maintenance, meals, commuting, and correspondence.
Time Labels
Productive, unproductive, reactive, or strategic.
Feel free to create your own labels. Think of terms like exciting, boring, positive, negative, etc. The point is to focus your attention on what your time actually means to you.
Health
While time is the fundamental resource, your health is right behind it. How quality is your time if your health is failing you? Look, in the Western world, we absolutely suck at managing our health. A library’s worth of books have been written on why. The only reason this matters is that you will be an outlier once you choose to focus on your health. You’ll shift from health being an afterthought to considering your health more important that anything else. Unfortunately, few people do this, and they won’t understand when you start.
Seriously, I cannot overstate this. Take a second to close your eyes and repeat this statement: “My health is the most important thing to me, and I will prioritize it above everything else in my life.”
You deserve a healthy life, but only because you earned it. Here’s where you’ll start:
Diet
Log everything you eat.
Log the source of everything you eat. Was it packaged? Was it once part of an animal? Do you know if it was sprayed with chemicals? Did a server simply set it in front of your face? Pay attention to the sources of your food.
Within 15 minutes of eating, log how you feel physically and mentally.
Create an album on your phone and call it “Diet.” Take photos of everything you eat and store them here.
Start simple. You don’t have to count calories or protein, though you’ll likely get interested in more granular metrics as you go. If you’re craving some metrics to start, log processed sugar and alcohol. You’re eventually gonna want to cut those way back.
Body Composition
Weigh yourself every day.
Create an album on your phone and call it “Body.” Take front and side photos of yourself weekly. Yes, this will be uncomfortable. Again, it’s not fun to force ourselves to face the results of our decisions. What is fun is seeing the progress from when you started to where you are later.
Strength and Fitness
If you aren’t exercising at all, then simply log your steps. This is the absolute baseline for what you can measure, and you want to get in the habit of measuring something. There’s no wrong place to start.
If you are exercising, log your workouts and include whatever metrics you’d like. The great thing about workouts is that they offer tons of specific metrics. Number of steps, your run time, how much you can lift, distances, heart rates, etc. are all easy to track.
Energy
Pay attention to your energy. Log when you feel particularly energetic and when you feel lethargic. You’ll learn how your daily energy works, and you’ll set a baseline for when you improve energy levels through sleep, exercise, and diet.
Mental Health
Log activities that directly contribute to better mental health. Categories include things like spiritual practice, meditation, journaling, breath work, nature walks, therapy, and any other practice that you find beneficial to your mental well-being.
Keep track of how you feel. Log times when you’re particularly happy, positive, optimistic, fulfilled, etc. Likewise, log when you’re feeling frustrated, angry, depressed, etc. You can correlate this to your other data sets, and you’ll be able to more easily identify causes and ways to help yourself. Consider the role of attitude in these assessments. You’ll often find correlations between your attitude and how you end up feeling about something.
Finances
Tracking finances has become much easier over recent years. There are a myriad of financial apps that will effectively track your expenses and financial categories for you. To become financially powerful, however, you also need to know what the numbers mean and how to act moving forward.
Income
Your income is the first part of a two-part financial equation. Start by assessing your source(s) of income and how much it all totals yearly. Break this down to monthly. Note whether income sources are regular or irregular. Assess whether you think you’re worth more than this, and explore every way you can think of to gain more income.
Expenses
Expenses are the second part of your financial equation. No matter how much you make, you can always outspend it. Financial freedom ultimately means you make as much as possible, spend within your means, and put surpluses to work for you. Track all expenses and fully understand your budget breakdown. Include all bills and discretionary spending. Make sure you include savings and any expenses that aren’t routine, such as gifts or emergency budgets.
Projections
Forecast your financial state by considering your income and expenses over the next 6-12 months. Ideally, you’re calculating a surplus and planning to set it aside for future use. If you’re projecting a deficit, you’ll need to figure out how to either make more or spend less. Know where you’re financial path leads.
Investments
Investments are assets that pay you back. Some pay you now, while others, like retirement accounts, pay you later. Market investment accounts have easy tools for keeping track. Even if you don’t have investments yet, make a category and put “$0” in it. You’ll eventually want to see that number go up.
Relationships
Most people have never once measured a single metric regarding their relationships. In fact, relationships might be the one area that people never move beyond “feelings.” Yet, they would all admit that relationships are incredibly important to them.
It may sound odd to take a strategic approach to relationships. From my assessment, however, the most successful relationships do exactly that, whether they realize it or not. The list below will get you started on how to assess the power of your relationships and to begin maximizing each of them.
Relationship inventory
Yeah, “inventory” sounds cold. But, there’s no better word for it. Make a list of your relationships on a spreadsheet. Rank their importance to you from 1 to 10 in the next column. In the second column, input how much time you’re spending interacting with each person. How do you feel about this? You’ll probably find the hours adding up for people who rank 1-5, while the 5-10s are getting robbed.
Relationship prioritization
If you don’t spend time with someone, do you really have a relationship? Like useless junk advertised to you non-stop, the list of distractions in life will never end. Assess how much quality time you’re spending with your most important relationships. This will reveal who needs more of your time and who should get less.
Strength of the relationship
Relationships that are in “maintenance mode” are almost always in deep trouble over the long haul. Assess the strength of your most important relationships. Identify how you can make the most important relationships stronger. This usually involves quality time, open communication, appreciation, setting shared goals, etc. The list below will also help you start.
Activities that strengthen the relationship
Once you’ve identified what will help make a relationship stronger, you’ll have a clear idea what you can actually do to strengthen it. Think about simple activities like family dinners, meetups at a park, weekend evenings with friends, video calls with family out of town, etc.
Professional Roles
Providing value to others is a fundamental part of the human experience. This simple idea gets lost in all the talk of jobs, careers, hobbies, and gigs. You’re literally weaving the other categories - time, health, finances, relationships - into this one thing. It’s important to know where you are at all times.
We’re not meant to be cogs in a nameless machine. We’re not meant to spend the majority of our day around people we don’t like doing things that provide us no meaning. And, no one is handing out opportunities to be important and fulfilled in our professional lives. You must earn this. You start by assessing where you are on your professional and creative path.
Career path and progress
If you’re employed, your company probably has some form of a review system. It probably also sucks. Learn to assess your own path and career metrics. Are you being routinely challenged? Do you feel like you’re growing in your role? Is there a level up, or a ceiling? What can YOU do to improve your possibilities in your career?
Type and quality of work
Break down the types of work you do and their quality. “Quality” means assessing the importance of the task and how much you get out of it. Are you happy with the ratio between “quality” work and work that simply must be done? How about the ratio between fulfilling work and soul-sucking work?
Type and quality of clients
If you run your own business, assess your clients. Consider their markets, how much you enjoy serving those markets, who the clients are and how much you get out of working with them. Calculate how much you earn per hour from them. Think about your ideal client types and compare them to your current clients.
Income generation opportunities
Whether you’re self-employed or work for someone else, there are plenty of income generation opportunities. Everything from overtime to freelancing, market investing to cash-flow assets are possible. Assess how many opportunities you currently have, then examine what else is possible. What does it take to get to those?
Analyzing the metrics
There’s evidence to suggest that simply gathering data can help you improve. However, this certainly isn’t the most powerful way to use this process. Once you’re set up to gather the data, the real power is in how you use it.
Break down each category in your Personal Assessment Guide into four segments:
The data (how much time you’re doing X, how often you feel Y, etc.)
What does the data reveal to you?
What’s your ideal target for each data set?
What would it take to get there?
Take Action!!!
Almost all self-assessment items fall under “important and not urgent.” We habitually default to “urgent and not important.” This is how you end up crushed under the weight of regrets on your deathbed.
Once you have assessed the items above, you must take action. Assessment without action won’t get you anywhere. You’ve identified what’s most important to you, so make the time to act.
Look at your calendar and begin to schedule the 2-3 most important actions you can take based on your assessments above. These can be daily routines or something you schedule once a week. Decide that these are more important than any other task during those times and make a commitment to yourself to follow through.
By committing to a process of routine assessment, you’re taking your gift of life seriously and helping yourself find ways to learn and grow.
This is a big deal!
Remember to keep it simple, be patient with yourself, and always orient yourself to action. No matter what you put in any of these data entries today, you’re a rock star who is capable of earning the life you really want.
Go get it!