Keeping Score When it Counts

Dear Jessica Brennan,

In business we often have a monthly scorecard that we use to evaluate our progress.  Tracking things like revenue and expenses, customer experience, speed and efficiency for delivery of services – all these types of indicators help improve a company and move it forward.

So I got to thinking. What if we kept score on other things in our personal life?  My mind went immediately to the things that we talk a lot about.  How many calories did I eat, how much money did I save, how many minutes did I exercise?  These are all good things to know, but that’s not what was really moving me as I considered this.

I think we should go deeper still.  What if we identified what’s important to us individually, and kept score on things like this:

• How many really good days did my kids have this month?
• How many times did all of us sit at the table to eat dinner?
• How many minutes did we spend, not looking into our phones?

In business we track indicators month over month and we do this because putting our attention on what is important and tracking it, keeps it front of mind, which in turns gently forces natural progress.

If we did this with the things that really matter to us, I suspect there would be the same outcome.  For example, our kids would have more good days, because we would be paying more attention to what kind of days they were having and adjusting accordingly. We would know we were holding ourselves accountable for things like family dinners, and zero-phone time, so we would naturally look for more ways to connect with each other. I don’t think this would be that difficult to put together, but I think the impact would be profound.

What you put your attention on expands,

Love Mum

xo