Getting Past Shiny Things: Choosing Core Metrics, Selecting Your Projects From Them

No one celebrates Thanksgiving in Taiwan, and my business partner is Canadian. But the majority of our clients are American, so the normal rigors of client calls and sales calls were wiped from the slate, leaving us a day to evaluate where exactly we were at.

It was both inspiring and shocking. If you're a small-business owner, I'd highly recommend you check out this post. I'm going to walk you through how we identified everything we could be doing, what we were doing well and poorly, and how we chose metrics to measure success and let that dictate our projects.

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The first thing we wanted to do is figure out exactly what we had implicitly or explicitly committed to.

When we calculated how many internal projects and initiatives we had active, or that we wanted to start in the near future, we realized we had 42 current internal projects that would represent hundreds if not thousands of hours to complete.

Conservation of Will

A particularly great comment by "Zeid1" on the post "Willpower Isn't Enough"; here's Zeid's comment in full -

Excellent Post.

The idea of Willpower being the answer is dangerous.  An example I think of is 12-step programs for fighting addiction.  In almost every 12-step program there is the need to submit to a higher power which can help you stop your habits.  This leads to some consternation from those who don't believe in a higher power, but the programs themselves are very effective. 

In my view this is hugely due to our cultural idea that the correct way for us to deal with something like addiction is to "Man Up" and will ourselves to stop doing whatever destructive behavior we're trying to avoid.  However, in the process of manning up, we're exhausting our ability to continue to do so, and in effect putting ourselves at a prime risk of relapse.