Half Way There

When I was young and learning fractions for the first time, my grandfather helped me grasp the concept by asking, "How many times can you cut a stick of butter in half?"

I didn't give it much thought. I shrugged my shoulders and replied, "I don't know. I guess once."

He said, "I want you to really think about this. You have a stick of butter. You can cut that stick in half, and it gives you two halves. You can take one of those halves and cut it in half. That gives you two smaller halves, or two quarters. You can take one of those quarters and cut it in half for two smaller halves, or two eighths. You can take one of those eighths and cut it in half. How many times can you cut a stick of butter in half?"

Well at such a young age, this was really blowing my mind. "I don't know. But it's a lot."

He said, "In theory, you can cut it in half forever. You can always get one more half. But in reality you can only cut it in half until your butter is the same width as your knife."

That was a breakthrough movement for me, and not just with fractions. That incident has become a powerful metaphor for me about continual improvement. No matter what I'm working on, I can never fully reach perfection. However, in theory, I can always get a half step closer; but in reality, I can only keep taking those half steps forward as long as my tools get sharper and finer. It still kind of blows my mind.

What Would You Track on your Personal Dashboard?

Nicolas Felton is a graphic designer who lives in New York and has taken on the sizable task of writing an annual report of his life. That really got me thinking, "What metrics would I measure if I were responsible for writing a report on my life at the end of the year?"

I know my dental hygienist would want me to track how often I floss; my coworkers, how quickly I return emails; my wife, the number of foot rubs I provide. But what would I track? How would I measure success?

I've been working on different options for a week or so (I haven't been tracking the time I've been spending on it, so I can't tell exactly how long). The process of determining my own person metrics has been eye opening and challenging. Some easy things like miles run or pages read jump to mind quickly, but that's not much of an annual report.

I'll have to keep working on what goes on my personal dashboard, but once I have a rough draft of what to measure, the next layer of complexity is to figure out how to track these events. Felton to the rescue with his new website Daytum. It's similar to Spark People, only you can count and measure whatever you want. Now instead of just counting pages read I can track which books I read faster and the number of pages on average per day. This could be additive. But maybe I should start by tracking the number of weird looks I get when I tell people what I'm doing.