Do you measure yourself ?

What gets measured gets done. Not very sure if it was Lord Kelvin or Peter Drucker. And although I have often reminded others about the importance of identifying a target and measuring progress against it, I recently realised I was not applying my own medicine ...

I am working on a PhD dissertation. It will for sure be great and exciting once it will all be finished. But for now, it is tedious, hard and to be honest ... quite boring. I have to listen to and analyze hours and hours of recordings that will allow me to confirm the main assumptions of my dissertation. I got started rather energetically some weeks ago. But that enthousiasm dwindled once I realized how much time all this was taking. Progress just seemed so terribly slow. I quite frankly though about whether I would ever get through all the listening and analyzing. Whenever I got back to work on my tedious never-ending list of tasks, I quickly gave up feeling that it wasn't really making a difference.

 And that's when I reminded myself about what I had applied to any type of performance goal for so many years: visualise and measure. So I created my only-to-myself meaningful visual of all the work ahead of me (and the little that was behind me), which ended up looking like little circles and bigger pizzas. Everytime I finished a new chunk I quickly colored in the corresponding space on the sheet. Doing this didn't make any of the actual work go faster, or even made it less boring ... ! But it created a level of motivation of 'seeing' the progress. And I am now capable of measuring my overall progress towards the goal of completion of all the work. As of this writing, I am at 76%. I am pretty sure measuring 'myself' in this way has helped to keep up the motivation.

We all know that what gets measured gets done. But think about applying this as well to personal goals and projects !