TRACK PERFORMANCE: The Past Predicts the Future

Make it a habit to track your performance.

Achieving expertise requires knowing your capacity. People who say they are “poor planners” are mostly poor observers of their performance in general.

Remember our discussion of mid-term equilibrium. Groups became active in the second half of any term, be it an hour or months. Why? Because they did not track their performance.

When there is none, the only measure is the midpoint. Why? Because it splits any term into two equal parts. When we are through the first half, we can see how much we have achieved, and by multiplying by two, we can quickly get the total amount of work if we continue with the same speed.

The same case is when you must turn in an essay in ten days and, in the middle, find that only a title is ready.

If you do not want such situations, split the term into subterms with checkpoints. If you need to finalize an essay that must be 5000 words in 10 days and have reviewed the literature already, the most straightforward plan is to write it in seven days (700 words per day), revise on the 8th, and have a buffer of two days, just in case.

The advice is a no-brainer, and most people will naturally follow it.

Yet, they will later be baffled to learn that they are “poor planners,” as they cannot write 700 words daily.

This situation is normal: your plan for a new endeavor will likely differ from your performance—the plan meets reality. You cannot know how much you can do without exploring your productivity. Thus, use the first day of your plan as an experiment to study your productivity. Treat it as a result, analyze it, and adjust the plan.

Usually, we hear “you do not know what you can truly achieve” in inspirational narratives, which implies that we have superpowers to achieve more. At work, “we do not know” means precisely that—the fact that we do not know. The only way to find out is to find out, and we must do it regularly for all important routines.

{ECPM, CHECKPOINT, EXPERT, REALITY, THE NOW, LEAVE TRACKS, MEANINGLESS METRICS, MAP YOUR DREAM, 100 SPLIT}