You Ask, I Answer: Personal Analytics and Quantified Self?

In today's episode, Mark asks for a business professional, what are the personal measurements we should be using to improve our game and remain relevant? Does anybody out there have metrics on yourself? Well, it depends on what it is that you're measuring. That's true of all forms of measurement. In something like personal growth as a professional, there's really a few uh handful of metrics.

Uh, my friend and co-host of Marketing Over Coffee, John Wall, has actually a four-part grid of things that are essentially family, uh, health, finance, and then professional development. It's sort of this four-part grid. And I think it's a really good framework for looking at at the things that you do. I might add a fifth one for like uh personal development, personal growth uh that can encompass things like spirituality or the art that you do, things to help you grow as a person, if not necessarily a business professional. So on the though on those buckets of metrics, obviously, health things are very easy to measure, right?

You can measure things like your blood pressure, your pulse rate, your weight, um any uh energy levels, uh, whatever your your smart devices all do, and you can set goals for things that you want to accomplish in those areas. So that one's pretty straightforward to measure, and and those are things that you should measure with the caveat of uh Seth Godin's caveat, which is if you're not going to change what you eat or how often you exercise, don't get on the scale, right? So if you're not going to this is true across the board for all these metrics. If you're not going to change what you do, don't bother measuring. On the family side, of course, there are things like how many nights uh uh a a week, a month, a year, are you home with your family, with your loved ones, people like that.

Um, what activities do you do with your family? And keeping track of that and just setting really those are there, there's sort of two aspects there, and it's very, very subjective. One is um, are you physically present, and then are you mentally present? So, even if you're there, uh, and and your devices actually will tell you, like your device will tell you uh, hey, you spent X amount of screen time now. If you're checking work all the time, and you have to be honest with yourself, and you your screen time levels keep going up and up and up and up.

That's clearly an indicator that that that's not going the direction you want. On the business metrics, as a business professional, particularly if you're working on things like your personal brand, again, very easy to measure. If you have a personal website, you better be running Google Analytics. If you are doing that things like a newsletter or a podcast or a YouTube channel, or all these different channels, of course, you're going to have metrics that correspond to those, and you set goals. Like I want to have you know, 20 or 30 or 40,000 unique visitors to my to my website, I want to have 50,000 subscribers to my email newsletter, whatever those things are in this bucket of the professional uh your your business results uh as a professional.

You want to do those things, and even if you work for a company, you will still have business results. Are you you know uh things that you're working towards that next promotion or a bonus or whatever you can put into that professional category? The ones that I think are neglected often are your personal development, your your professional development, your training and development. What certifications do you work towards? Um, and if you're not working towards a certification, was your learning plan look like?

Uh, one that I do a lot is I'll take a cheat sheet of a technology that I want to learn. Everything from like D Plier to TensorFlow to Keras, uh, all these machine learning frameworks. There are plenty of these printable one-page cheat sheets, which is really a nice way of saying an index. And then I start checking off as I learn each technique. Okay, I want to get through five cheat sheets this year, so I gotta start learning each technique.

What does it do? Why do why would you do it? When do you use it? How does it work? Until I complete a sheet and look at it, and then I know, okay, I've got a good understanding of the tidyverse now.

Um you just move through those sheets. So whatever the cheat sheets are for your your industry. And then the last one's really tough because again, it requires a lot of self-awareness, a lot of a lot of uh subjective perspective on yourself, but that is that personal growth. What do you do to grow as a human being? What in the art that you do?

Are you learning to play guitar? Are you a martial artist? Are you doing archery? Uh, what are all these things that you do, and then how are you making progress in them? So in the martial arts, there are grades you can work to, there are techniques you can work on.

Same for archery. You know, are you more accurate today? Uh, in your music, are you improving in your music skills? Do you sing? Are you enunciating better?

Are you opening your jaw better? Are you letting more air out? Can you differentiate between chest voice and head voice? So, all these techniques that are part of that personal growth and that spiritual growth too. That's an area where it's not enough to just show up.

You actually have to have a plan for improvement, even for something as simple as like going to church, right? And being a good whatever your religious faith is, what does that mean? And what goals are you working to in those areas to be a better whatever that your faith is in adhering to in adherence to your doctrines? So, those are the I would suggest setting up like a mind map or a spreadsheet or however you work best with that type of information, but then yeah, start measuring, start setting goals, set small measurable goals. I track a lot of these pieces of data myself, uh, just you know in a Google Sheet, um, and just know that and just be able to see improvement, see improvement over time.

Uh, and there are many, many, many good apps that allow you to track this data uh and then plan against it. There's a whole movement, and you may want to look it up, or Google called quantified self, where you look at how much of everything are you doing that you care about that you're willing to make changes about. Uh you can track it and then you you make those changes and you see what changes work, what changes don't. So, really good question. One that requires again a lot of self-awareness, a lot of self-honesty, uh, which is can be really, really tough, and uh and measuring in those buckets and then being able to see one of the most interesting things, by the way, is seeing how the buckets influence each other.

So you may start to really kill it at work, but your fitness level goes down, right? Or uh you you double up on your fitness, but your spiritual growth goes down, right? So, how are you going to measure and keep that balance? That is that is pure trade-off analytics. That is uh in the machine learning world, that's multiparto, multi-objective optimization.

How do you balance time and money and effort so that each bucket grows slowly and you're not cannibalizing one, or if you do cannibalize one, it is a conscious short-term choice. Um lots to do, lots of lots to think about on this, but try that measurement framework and see if you can make it work for you. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Well, help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems. Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.