A palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, made a list of the top 5 most common themes that surfaced again and again from people nearing the end of their lives. They are: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn’t […]
Time Is The Ultimate Self-Improvement Metric
A tech startup watches Daily Active Users. An eCommerce site tracks Conversion Rate. The stock market obsesses over Earnings Per Share. So what metric should we be focusing on when measuring ourselves? Time. Whether we like it or not, time is the best indicator for what is most important to us. Time explains why we […]
Measuring Daily Word Count To Write A Novel
437 days ago I began writing my second novel and I just self-published it this week. During those 437 days I learned a lot about how to write a novel. I’ve also come to terms with the fact that almost no one will ever read it. So I thought I would share my thoughts on […]
The Point Of Self-Tracking Is Not The Data
There are multiple tools out there to easily record data about yourself: steps taken in a day can be tracked with Fitbit, Mint.com will track all of your spending and Apple Watch will track your sleep. Steps, expenses and sleep could all be tracked before these tools became available but the record-keeping was time-consuming, requiring […]
Want To Change? Measure Yourself.
Is it the data that’s collected that helps us improve or is it the mere effort of measuring that makes the difference? A 2006 study in a German hospital found that simply telling staff that their “hygienic performance” was being monitored improved hand washing by 55%. In another study, two groups of teenagers were told […]