I Failed 22 Times in January
I started tracking 6 daily tasks in January that I believe are going to set me up for success this year. I’m supposed to post to LinkedIn, write 100 words, read for 15 minutes, publish a podcast, e-mail a guest, and exercise for 1 hour each day. In January if I were to complete each of those 6 tasks everyday I would have completed 186 total tasks. I only completed 164 tasks.
This means I failed 22 times in January. A few of these failures are due to the fact that I don’t publish a podcast on Saturday. I still mark this as a failure, even though I don’t actually post anything that day. Even with that discounted I missed 18 tasks between two objectives.
I missed 11 exercise targets and 7 e-mails. That’s a decent amount of failure. However, if I look at the big picture, I was successful a total of 88% of the time. I was perfect on completing 3 tasks (posting to LinkedIn, writing 100 words, and reading 15 minutes). And even the task I failed 11 times I was successful 20 times. 20 workouts in a month is a solid start to January.
The truth about all of these is that I want to see areas of weakness. I want to fail. Because if I wasn’t failing at something then I wouldn’t be challenging myself to improve. If I finished January with 100% success, it’d be time to pick some new goals and daily tasks. My goal is after 3 months I up the ante on a few of these tasks. Especially the 3 I hit 100%. It might be time to make these more challenging.
A large part of creating success in our life is tracing our progress toward tasks. The system of monitoring my daily activity is a huge part of allowing me to create daily action. It’s also why I made it through the month with 100% task completion on writing and reading.
There were at least two occasions where I hadn’t read my 15 minutes and it was almost time for bed. If I didn’t know that it would break my streak of perfect days I would have gone to bed and been none the wiser. Instead I didn’t want to break the streak. I didn’t want to fail a task that I knew I could do, even if I didn’t want to do it in that moment. The same situation occurred at least twice with my writing.
Writing 100 words is so easy. This post is already over 400 words. I’ve been working on it for 5 minutes. There’s no reason I can’t write 100 words. But that’s the point. I want the task to be so simple at first it’s a no brainer to complete. Now that I’ve built a streak I can start to push the difficulty. I can increase the minutes, words, or posts. Because now I have a streak on the line. I know what it feels like to do these things daily.
However, none of this growth would be possible without tracking. I would probably have skipped multiple days of every task if I wasn’t watching what I was doing. How are you monitoring your progress this year? How’d your first month of 2023 go? Do you feel there’s room for improvement? What’s your next step? Without knowing where you’re currently at, you won’t know where you need to go next. If you haven’t been tracking your progress and you need help let me know. I’ll be happy to share my system.
It doesn’t matter how you track. Use a white board, a traditional calendar, stickers, your iPhone, or some personalize spreadsheet. It doesn’t matter how you choose to track it, just that you do. Stop guessing whether you’re doing what needs to be done and start monitoring your progress. You might be surprised at what all you can get done with a little accountability. Whether you crushed January or you haven’t even started yet, the scoreboard starts over in February, time to get back to work.
