My New Month's Resolution: Learning from data and small bites

Tis the season for New Year’s Resolutions, isn’t it?

It struck me that one reason why New Year’s resolutions are powerful incentives is because they are external milestones to trigger a change in behavior. They also come at the right time—when we are thinking about the past year and willing to learn from the prior twelve months.

The main weakness from the idea of a New Year’s resolution is that it happens once a year. Being reflective, learning from your past, analyzing data, and committing to new patterns of practice once a year is insufficient. It also has the risk of making you feel like you’ve failed if you haven’t accomplished your New Year’s resolution.

So like you should periodically revisit your investment portfolio and understand your asset allocation, I will do that with my time and goals.

What does this mean?

• I shall focus on New Month’s Resolutions rather than New Year’s. But because I am measuring things in months (or maybe weeks) rather than year’s, the scope of my goal is to be smaller.
• I need to collect data. For example, IT helpdesk is one my responsibilities here at the Foundation. This means that I need to measure everything in my helpdesk ticketing system—we currently use Salesforce at the end of the month.
• I need to learn from the data to understand if I am making progress towards my goal. If I consistently see the same incidents arise in the IT system, it is an opportunity to figure out a better way of dealing with the issue.

• I will hold myself and my colleagues to a higher level of communication and transparency and accountability based on the data

Expect a post in 30 days about how well I’m doing.