Any time you take a chance and try something, whether it be a new project or anything else, you should be keeping track of the results you’re seeing from it. In order for you to know what’s working and what needs adjustment, you need to be able to track and understand these things.
Not only does it help you make adjustments as needed, but it also gives you something to look back on later to see what was working for you then. Many people tend to oversimplify what it means to track results.
Often times, it’s seen as a binary, meaning that it either worked or it didn’t and that’s all that matters. However, that’s not the only factor you should be keeping track of. For example, if something worked, but the end result was disproportionate to the amount of work it took for you to get it to work, then it may not actually be worth it.
Keeping track of the difficulty and amount of effort a task required can help not only to keep you motivated and focused, but it also helps understand if that was worth it. Another thing to keep track of is how much you got out of that project, as in what you got in return for your efforts.
For example, let’s say you were working at a part time job. If you worked an extra 10 hours per week, you might be more tired and have less time, but you’d track how much you got in return financially for that extra work, and from there you can analyze it and see if it was worth it or not.
Sometimes you might not be getting enough return to warrant you putting in the amount of effort. Essentially, what you want to know is how much effort you put into something, and what you got out of it, and from there you can start to work on your next move.
There’s so much information that you can collect on a project, and putting it all into terms of “worked” or “didn’t work” is underwhelming to say the least. Something that didn’t work might be worth it if you can put a bit more effort into it, and something that did work might not be worth the return.
Successful people keep very good track of these statistics in order to make the right moves and become even more successful.
