Creating Your Life Dashboard

A couple of months ago I did an exercise to examine my life, spending a weekend retreat reflecting and learning more about myself and what matters to me. More recently, I was looking at 2015 and what happened during that calendar year — personal growth, professional growth, challenges, accomplishments, lessons learned. It was quite the year!

All of this reflection inspired the question, what does the dashboard for my life look like? What am I measuring? What does success in life look like?

Companies have dashboards with KPIs, goals, metrics up the wazoo. Objectives and key results (OKRs). Why don’t we do the same for our life? A company without a vision, mission, goals and objectives is kind of floundering. So doesn’t that mean that without a vision, mission, goals and objectives for our lives we can end up floundering.

I didn’t have a dashboard for my life last calendar year, but I did go back and start to take inventory of what happened, and think about what could’ve been measured. It looked something like this….

Now that I’m aware of the fact that my life has a dashboard, whether I’m measuring it or not, I decided to take action and be proactive about creating my life dashboard. My deliberate dashboard looks a bit more like this…

I categorized my dashboard based on my values and passions in life, articulated in a blog post I wrote years ago (yes, they are the same, a testament to how core they are to me). It’s like the saying goes, if you don’t measure it you can’t manage it. We manage what we measure, and a life dashboard helps us measure it. It’s an activity that doesn’t have to take long to do, but can have lasting impacts on our achievements and life satisfaction.

How to make your life dashboard

Step 1. Create a vision for yourself.

Answer the questions: What’s Vision for myself? What kind of person do I want to be? Either in paragraph form, or a list.

For example: Grateful person, Creating things to make world better, Helping and connecting with people, Be healthy.

Step 2. Translate your vision into actionable metrics.

How does that translate into actionable metrics? Looking at your vision for yourself, figure out how that translates into actionable metrics (i.e. things you can measure over the course of time to feel a sense of progress toward your vision).

For example,

• How can I measure gratitude? Number of thank you cards I send.
• How do I measure health? Number of times I get sick. Number of times I eat healthy, go to gym, etc.
• Helping people? How many people did I help.

Step 3. Create your dashboard.

The actionable metrics become your dashboard. Set reasonable targets. Then can evaluate and grow each month, quarter, year, whatever timeframe you’d like.

Be proactive with your life. Set a plan. Make reasonable goals and go for it. We do it with our companies, so why not do it for ourselves?!

❤

Mary