I meet many people who feel unsuccessful.  They haven't achieved anything they're proud of, they've bounced from one crisis to another and they have nothing to show for it.  They wonder where all that time went, and are often surrounded by tasks and ambitions that are half-done at best.  Without a sense of success, they too easily become more and more despondent.

This was an issue that had me curious for awhile – and I found one of the major differences between people who can get things done and those who fail to is all about numbers.

In the popular book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job one of the things that makes a job miserable is 'immeasurement' – the fact results and success cannot be measured.  No measurement means misery and aimlessness.

In Project Management, my discipline, measuring is a big part of it – how many hours spent, is something signed off on by the right people, are the hours booked, is a report on time.  I can throw open an application and measure success with a few reports in a few minutes.  Though my life is charts and graphs, it's actually pretty fulfilling.

Numbers express meaning when we use them right. Measurements give meaning.

Someone who wants to succeed has to learn how to measure success in the first place.  A person who can't measure success in their efforts doesn't know how their progressing toward their goals or even if their goals are reached.  Without measurement its hard to direct one's efforts appropriately and efficiently, and a lack of graspable measures makes it all too easy to leave things undone.

That was the common threat I noticed in people who were having trouble getting their acts together – whatever ambitions they had, they didn't have ways to measure their successes.  They could talk goals and dreams, but because they couldn't measure progress (or didn't), those goals and dreams didn't get reached.  They had no way to measure or guide their efforts, and without regular assessment, those goals are forgotten.

To avoid the trap of not measuring, one has to learn how to measure things that are important to you – progression in a career, educational credits gained, milestones reached, even free time left open for anything else.  A person doing the measuring needs to take regular time to assess progress so they can see how their doing so they can complete efforts, redirect them, or even in some cases give them up.

Learn to identify what's important to you in your life and career, and start finding ways to measure it, and take regular time to do it – I do it once a week, sitting down for about an hour and reviewing my plans and schedules.  Track your numbers and goals and see how it goes.

A few examples:

• Many things break down into numbers easily – such as attempting to get a certain level of pay, or acquire a certain number of educational credits.
• Sometimes you can find a simple numeric measurement – perhaps you want to produce X pieces of art by Y date.  Then do so.  You may have to guess at what a good system is but a bad system is better than none (since you can always change it)
• A time measurement fits many simple tasks – take care of a certain task by a certain date.
• Try a percentage measurement – perhaps you want to exercise 5 days out of 7.  Track that in a notebook or spreadsheet.  You may occasionally fail at such goals, but as long as you can maintain them for long stretches, I'd say that's success.
• Find the numbers in a system.  If you're building a website, find out how many pages and components it has and check them off as you do them – giving you a percentage complte.
• Set deadlines when at all possible, just so you have something to meet.

For fan-to-pro people like us, it can be hard to use numbers – it's hard to quantify what you love and what you like, and one's passion can carry them far without much measurement.  However, I find to really go far you need to learn how to measure – sometimes the first step out of your mundane career an into a geeky one is when you start measuring your path toward something greater.

You won't always reach your numbers.  You will revise your schedules.  You will fail at times – but as you're measuring, you'll know why, and you can fix things and move on.  As long as you're measuring, you'll keep steering yourself toward success.

- Steve