Key Lifestyle Indicators: A Powerful Tool for Long Term Success
In one of my most popular posts of 2010, I proposed the idea of Key Lifestyle Indicators (KLIs). Similar to how a business can use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to gain a quick snapshot of the overall success of the company, KLIs can quickly let you know how on track you’ve been with the most important parts of your life. Depending on your life priorities, these indicators can track how often you spend time with your family, work on a side business, spend time with friends, and more.
I mentioned in that post that although the idea makes sense on paper and works incredibly well for large businesses, I had yet to test it for personal use. So I decided to start a two month experiment, in which I would track my KLIs every day. After two months of tracking, I’m happy to say that the KLI system exceeded my expectations and I plan to continue tracking my KLIs permanently. This post will discuss my findings on the importance of KLIs and how you can use them in your own life to keep you on track towards achieving your most important goals.
Why Key Indicators Are So Effective
Considering that we live in a world of information overload, cutting through clutter is a very important skill. Trying to learn too much at once will almost guarantee that you will retain none of it. Similarly, taking on too many goals at once will almost guarantee stress, burn-out, and poor progress on those goals.
Successful people are able to identify the goals that will make the most powerful impact on their lives and work on those as a priority before tackling less important goals. This is the 80/20 rule at its finest: these individuals tackle the 20% of goals that will give them 80% of their happiness/desired lifestyle.
When I was setting up my KLIs, I was forced to ask myself: Which 3 or 4 goals, activities, and/or areas of my life are most important to my overall success, happiness, and life satisfaction? After many hours of deliberation, I came up with this group of goals and activities, which I refer to as my “critical few.” The critical few that I came up with are my social life, my blog, exercise, and my career.
Note: I strongly believe that one of the most beneficial parts of tracking your KLIs is this process of defining your critical few. Do not exceed four KLIs, as anything above this number can ruin the purpose of having a critical few. Based on my own personal experience, having to constantly monitor and manage five or more KLIs requires too much effort to remain a sustainable practice.
Don’t Include Goals and Activities That You Have Comfortably Under Control
I have my finances under control. I have my accounts automated for my monthly expenses, I save a portion of everything I earn, and I don’t have excessive outstanding college loans to worry about. So even though money is incredibly important to me (as a college student who has to work within a budget), I don’t include that in my KLIs because it is something that I already have comfortably under control.
However, I did include my social life as one of my KLIs because I have a tendency to lock myself up like a hermit and not socialize on the weekends. This is a decision that I usually regret later, and I wouldn’t want to graduate college regretting not having met more people. Therefore, I find it incredibly important to track my social life as a KLI because it requires active investment that pushes me outside my comfort zone.
If all of my KLIs were areas of my life in which I was completely content and had no trouble keeping on top of, why would I bother to track them? Each of your KLIs should represent a crucial area that you desire to reach new grounds in. Therefore, let’s refine the question you should ask yourself when deciding your KLIs: Which 3 or 4 goals, activities, and/or areas of my life — that I don’t comfortably have under control — are most important to my overall success, happiness, and life satisfaction?
Important areas of your life that you have comfortably under control should be reviewed less frequently (once a month or so). I chose to track my social life, my blog, exercising, and advancing my career because these are important parts of my life that I believe require constant and active effort to reach the level that I consider successful.
How to Track Your KLIs
There were a few criteria that I felt were important in tracking KLIs:
1) Daily progress should be tracked, since putting in some effort every day will add up to big results over the course of months and years
2) Since tracking occurs daily, it should incredibly easy to record (less than 5 seconds)
3) It should be effortless to measure progress over time
4) There should be an incentive towards long-term, sustained effort
5) There shouldn’t be a steep penalty for falling off the bandwagon for a day or two
To create a system that tracks KLIs based on the criteria listed above, I created a spreadsheet on Google Docs. This would allow me to access the spreadsheet from any computer or smart phone (portability is important for my lifestyle). I made four columns, one for each of my KLIs. Now here is a crucial point: in order to make tracking effortless, I chose to make the measurement scale subjective, rather than objective.
What do I mean by this? An example of an objective measure would be “How many nights did I go out and socialize this week?” or “How many calories did I eat today?” I chose not to use objective measures because they are often difficult to calculate on a daily basis, the numbers vary greatly between each KLI (which makes it tough to compare KLIs to each other), and the difficulty in calculation would discourage consistent tracking.
I chose to use subjective measures, such as: “Regarding my social life, how fulfilled and accomplished do I feel today?” To measure this, I use a simple scale of 1 through 5. If I was a lazy bum who didn’t make any effort that day, I marked it down as a 1. If I went out, met new people, and had a great time with friends, I’d mark it as a 5. If I quickly met a friend for lunch, I’d mark it down as a 3 or a 4. Simple. At first, I thought that this oversimplified measurement may not be effective, but it turned out to be a great system. It was incredibly easy to track and was very accurate relative to how much effort I put into each KLI that day. And over the long term, I had no interest in knowing, for example, how many times I went out each night. I was simply curious if I was investing consistent and significant effort to have an active social life.
But you may be wondering, how do I effortlessly track my progress over time without having to create annoying charts and diagrams? Simple. I used color coding. If a KLI was at a high level, it would be automatically colored green. Yellow was somewhere in the middle and red indicated that I was neglecting that KLI. This provided instant feedback for me whenever I would start to get off track. See the screenshot below for my actual KLI tracking spreadsheet.
As you can see from the spreadsheet, I had been neglecting my blog (Column B) in the beginning of December, but later got back on track. On the other hand, I was very actively exercising (G = gym) and working towards my fitness goals. You can tell all of that by a quick glance of the spreadsheet.
And finally, I wanted to create an incentive toward consistent progress and not penalize myself for falling off the bandwagon for a day or two. Therefore, I chose to create a 4-day moving average that would determine the true measure for the day. The formula I used is as follows:
TodayFinalScore=(0.4*Today)+(0.3*Yesterday)+(0.2*TwoDaysAgo)+(0.1*ThreeDaysAgo)
So if I felt that today was a ‘5’, but the past three days have been rated ‘1’ due to zero effort, today’s actual score would be (2.0+0.3+0.2+0.1) = 2.6. This created a system where I would need to show consistent commitment before my score would improve after an extended period of poor performance. Furthermore, it prevents one day from ruining all of my hard work. For example, let’s say today I scored a 1 on my career KLI, but the past 3 days prior I invested a LOT of time into my career through job applications and networking. Here is how the formula would calculate my score:
TodayFinalScore=(0.4*1)+(0.3*5)+(0.2*5)+(0.1*5)= (0.4+1.5+1.0+0.5) = 3.4
So even though I was too busy for this one day to make progress on my career, I score still reflects the fact that I put in a lot of hard work in the few days leading up to it.
To wrap up this section, I created a spreadsheet in which I put in my daily numbers on a subjective scale of 1 through 5, and then the spreadsheet automatically calculates a moving average and color codes the result. Here is a screenshot of the spreadsheet to show my daily input vs. the color-coded moving average:
Conclusion
Tracking KLIs has proven to be an insanely simple and effective way to hold myself accountable for making consistent progress in the areas of my life that are most important to me. I used to let certain areas of my life pass under the radar if I were to get busy with schoolwork or other obligations. Often, it would take me weeks to realize that I had been neglecting that part of my life. With KLI tracking, I am instantly aware if I’m neglecting any of these key areas for any longer than a few days. And with this newfound awareness, I am more able to quickly take action and keep my life in balance before a real problem emerges.
Let me know what you think of the idea of tracking KLIs in the comments below! And if you want a clean copy of the spreadsheet I use to track my KLIs, let me know in the comments section and I’ll post a link to it.