This week, I want to talk about why I track and measure everything in life. I mean my health, fitness, nutrition, wealth, income, and personal financials. And my business goals, all the KPIs, the key performance indicators that move the needle in my businesses.
Now, why do you do that?
Some might ask, why do you spend that amount of time and technology and bandwidth and mindspace and tracking everything? It’s kind of an overload. Well, in some ways it might be, but I streamlined it and stay focused on the key things that really matter. Because I know that what we track and measure we improve and what we don’t, it just kind of falls into disarray.
So what this allows me to do is see, what’s working in my life. What’s creating a positive impact. And do more of that, implement and add more of that into my life. And what it allows me to also do just as important is leave behind the things that aren’t working. Leave those things behind and let them go, replace them, substitute them, put more things in that are working, remove more things that aren’t.
And this has been really helpful for me in my life as I’ve been kind of the architect of my life and my lifestyle and creating one that I can be proud of, living a life on my terms, that’s healthy, that’s impactful, that’s purposeful. That allows me to do the things I want to do. Spend the time with those, I want to spend the time with, travel, have an impact and live in a healthy, full state each and every day.
So a couple of things we do to that end that helps us in this area is using the right technology to help us manage these things. These key data things. So on the health end for me, it’s the Apple watch. You can use a Fitbit as well. And I use the oura ring, which is a great sleep tool that helps me measure my sleep patterns. When and where I’m getting enough sleep, my different signs, how we can improve those and different strategies around that. And the iPhone connects seamlessly with that through the app, as well as the i-watch.
So the Apple watch or Fitbit or another one of these helps you track your physiology and your different kind of health metrics as it relates to burnt calories, distance ran or biked, um, heart rate, rest, time recovery, all these different things are important because we want to have a good fixing handle on what’s again, working on our workouts, our nutrition plan, our sleeping, and what’s not.
Track your personal financial realm
What I do is I use certain technology and apps to help me there as well. I use QuickBooks online, which is really great to manage your finances, both personally and professionally. I use that for my businesses as well as something called a liveplan, which helps me create forecasts and budgets. They compare them in real time to the actuals because it connects seamlessly with QuickBooks. Which connects to your bank in a read-only format, very secure. So you can see manage, categorize, and plan your personal finances and your business finances. With the help of my bookkeeper and accountant, I can check on the status of my businesses and personal affairs.
If there’s some things that need to be corrected again, do something more, that’s working, do something less that isn’t. Addition and subtraction of things that are working and not working really helpful. A lot of these apps will allow you to save and invest for the future with a little to no effort and very low costs. One app that I like is acorns. It rounds up all my purchases directly connects to my checking account. I also set up a regular contributions every week and month.
Now I have a lot of money in there by setting it on autopilot, but just letting it kind of accumulate and get siphoned off for my primary checking account. I’m really proud of that because now it automated and systematized something that ordinarily would be more painful to do, and we might put it off or defer it or find another use for the money at the end of the year, rather than saving for our future, rather than investing in our retirement. So that’s another great way to take a hold and reclaim your future.
Track your business KPI’s
I use a lot of different tech to measure the health of the business. It all starts with accounting, which is the language of business. QuickBooks, online, live planning, forecasting, and budgeting, really my P & L in my financial statements every month. And seeing if I need to change things where I can make improvements, where I can make cutbacks really, really big. Also creating a dashboard in our business for other KPIs. So for us, that certain web traffic, that certain sales processes, that certain impressions and conversions on our marketing campaigns, those are all really important things for us to know. If we’re not tracking them adequately, we could be spending a lot of money on things that aren’t working or generating a return on investment.
So just another example of how we use technology and why it’s so important to measure and track our data in certain key areas so that we can improve and get better. Hopefully these ideas on how to really use technology and data to track and measure helped. The point is track and measure those things that are important to you. You’ll start to get closer to the numbers and the habit, and you’ll start to create better results. And there’s a lot of technology out there to help you. You’ll need discipline and commitment. But being the architect of your life and being mindful of the inputs will help you create better outputs.
Share this with somebody that could benefit from it too. And again, always enjoy being here with you to your success and happiness.