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I’m doing a lot of work right now for my main client on a product, called Pulse,that is used to help organizations track the performance metrics of their investments.

Now, normally, if you invest money in a business, you want a return, so you measure numbers like “revenue” and “profit” and “cost of goods sold” and “margin”. You want to know that the business is doing all it can to make money, because you, then, have the opportunity to make money.

But some businesses have different goals, such as drilling wells for water in Africa, or encouraging small business growth in India, or employing women in South America; they aren’t designed just to turn a huge profit, but to have a “social impact.” Such organizations are typically called “impact investors” or “socially-responsible businesses.”

Of course, they need completely different metrics. Their investors still need to know that the million dollars they invested isn’t being used by somebody to take a cruise or buy a fancy car; they want to know that they are actually making a difference. But they need things like “gallons of pure water available” or “number of local raw material suppliers” or “women employed”. So Pulse gives them the ability to track those numbers.

At lunch today, a colleague said something that made me think about personal metrics tracking: it’s important to make sure that you, in your life, are tracking the sort of performance metrics that matter to your career goals.

The first thing anybody ever says about your resume s to “quantify your impact.” If your work resulted in another 50K in subscribers or a million dollars in sales, you put that down. The problem is, if you don’t work for a) a company where you’re privy to that sort of information and b) in a role where there is a visible correlation between your input and quantifiable output, it’s pretty hard to do. As a programmer, for example, it may not be possible to say “the search feature I added to this page resulted in 100 more subscribers per day,” and the company’s financials may be too locked-down to say “those subscribers equated to a 2% profit margin increase” or whatever.

Before you get sidetracked in thinking about creative ways you might go about quantifying the fictional programming problem above, let me just say that it might not matter. If you are a programmer and you are likely to be hired by another technical person, it’s more important for you to quantify other things: languages learned, the number of projects you did, the lines of code, the size of the database. A technical person may not expect you to know–and may not care–what your impact was on the company’s profit margin. After all, it’s not like you made the business decision to upgrade the search form, and it’s not likely that you’ll be asked to make business decisions in a programming role!

On the other hand, if you’re trying to get a business job, then it’s important for you to choose metrics that quantify your business impact.

For me, I’m making the transition from being a hands-on technical person to being a more strategic-level business person. So, a given project description could go from:

“Implemented web-based social networking application using open-source PHP engine and MySQL database to display appropriate subscriber information, including customized dependent picklist functionality and advanced profile search.”

to

“Evaluated technology frameworks for web-based social networking application, installed and configured chosen framework, including appropriate security updates, and customized default features to support mission-critical functionality.”

to

“Built social networking application to support 200 initial users, growing to 5000 within 3 months, within constraints of non-funded startup environment, making business cash-flow positive for the first time.”

Pretty different statements for very different goals. But they all refer to the same actual work.

You could go beyond just thinking about metrics in terms of career, if you were so inclined: of course, “how much money do you make?” is the usual go-to, but it doesn’t have to be. How many countries have you visited? How many different restaurants in town have you eaten at? Or, how many hours have you volunteered for charities? How much blood have you donated?

As I’ve said many times before, you have to run the numbers, which means you have to measure. But equally important is making sure that your measurements are useful in determining progress towards your goal. And, of course, you need your goal.

As many of you know, I think that the process of exploring little tips and tricks for productivity is probably more interesting than the end result of that increased productivity–the journey over the destination, as it were.

The latest thing I’ve come up with is the reversal of one of Kara’s favorite motivational techniques. She likes to say “just work on something for 15 minutes,” the idea being that you can trick your brain into thinking that the work process will only last a short while, which ends up being the necessary rev-up time to get moving full-speed, and before you know it, you don’t feel like stopping.

The only problem with that technique is that it encourages getting to the end of the “working” period. You’re looking forward to that 15 minutes being over.

Similar is the idea of saying that you’ll work on something for an hour, or until a certain time. Again, because the end point is the goal, you fixate on just killing enough time to reach the point where you don’t have to work anymore…”well, it’s almost quitting time, and I’ve done enough for today.” Anyone who has worked in a typical office job–or attended school of any kind–is probably well-acquainted with this phenomenon.

I was thinking of myself, the procrastinator, who doesn’t strictly enjoy deadline pressure, but at least responds to it. And I was thinking of my alarm clock, and how wonderful the feeling of pushing the “snooze” button is. So I thought I’d put the two together and set a the countdown timer on my phone for an hour, at which point, if I wanted, I could hit the screen and “snooze” the countdown for another hour. Instead of “just work on it for 15 minutes,” I resolved to say “you’ve only got an hour, so get going.”

The results were interesting. I didn’t set a specific goal: just that I had to get “as much done as possible” by the time the hour was up. I found myself checking email hurriedly, glancing at the clock, trying to see how much I could get done by my self-imposed deadline. That forced me into the “flow” mindset; I wasn’t killing time to get to the end of working, but instead, I had to keep moving as I was running out of time with every moment. And when the countdown alarm rang, I actually enjoyed hitting the “reset” button to give myself another hour of work. I kept it up for about 4 or 5 hours straight, and by that time, it was much harder to stop working than it was to continue.

I think there are four key takeaways here: first is that the image of a clock ticking down towards a deadline is actually quite effective at producing the same sense of urgency as a real deadline. Second, an hour seems just the right length to give the impression of having plenty of time while still passing quickly enough to generate some tension. Third, even if you waste quite a bit of your hour, you’re likely to actually ramp up and work for 20-30 minutes towards the end of it, which is enough to establish some momentum–the feeling of “Uh oh, now I’ve only got 30 minutes!” is quite motivating. Finally, you short-circuit the negative emotions involved with continuing to work with the positive feeling of hitting “snooze” or otherwise giving yourself hour after bonus hour.

It’s a simple technique, and your phone probably has a countdown timer, or there’s an egg timer in your kitchen. I’m going to try it again the next time I need a little artificial deadline pressure.

There’s stuff you’re not going to want to do, there’s stuff that’s hard to do, there’s stuff you’re not even that good at doing, and there’s stuff that might even be somebody else’s job.

Sometimes, you have to do this stuff.

I had drinks with a former professor of mine last week, and this was one of the topics that came up. How do you motivate yourself to do those things you don’t want to do?

I think it makes sense to talk about this in context of the strengths analysis; one of my conclusions from that process is that you need to figure out little tricks to getting things done in a way that leverages your natural abilities. The little trick is to figure out how to arrive at your destination using perhaps a less-than-obvious route, by using a technique or approach or method that works with your grain.

According to my colleague, there’s a similar trick to coping with those undesirable but unavoidable tasks: make them your own.

His example was a powerpoint presentation that needed to be done to his satisfaction; however, being the CEO, it was not really his responsibility to be doing such things by hand. That said, the presentation had not been done (to his satisfaction), and he found that he had to roll up his sleeves and do it himself.

What made it tolerable was a little righteous indignation: he had given others the opportunity to give their input, and to shape the task, but they had not done so, and so had forfeited all right to complain about what he eventually came up with. The train had left the station, and it was his way or the highway.

He still had to suffer through the task, but he made it his own. He did it…on his terms.

Such a blatant approach doesn’t always work, but you can always be subtle. If you don’t want to make dinner, season it your way, or play music while you cook, or whatever it takes. If you don’t want to analyze some data, format the spreadsheet in pretty colors. If you’re trapped in a boring meeting, think about how much money you’re making as each minute goes by.

If all else fails, there’s nothing wrong with resorting to childish methods. In your head, chant the mantra, “I’m not doing this because you told me to do it, I’m doing it because I want to do it!”

There are about a million different personality evaluation tools, and it’s not surprising that one called “Strength Finder” is focused on maximizing strengths rather than minimizing weaknesses. In fact, my first exposure to methodology seemed to go as far as to suggest that minimizing weaknesses is ultimately futile; it’s “damage control” rather than an effective tactic.

Now, some of this is, I think, just nomenclature; I don’t think that the methodology intends to suggest that, if “being late” is a weakness, you should just ignore it and focus on one of your strengths. In their eyes, a “strength” is an inherent talent and a description of a particular natural tendency which ought to be value-neutral. A “weakness” is simply a non-strength, or non-tendency.

As an aside, I think that using “strength” as that descriptor is inherently flawed, as is “weakness”. But then again, I don’t have a multi-million-dollar self-analysis framework.

So, let’s redefine in a way that makes more sense. Instead of “strengths,” you have natural tendencies. Instead of “weaknesses” you have non-tendencies. Some people are naturally competitive and some aren’t. Some are naturally focused, and some aren’t.

This doesn’t mean that a person who is not naturally competitive cannot compete. But, it may require more effort, and they may never be as successful in a highly-competitive environment as someone with the tendency.

Activities and learned skills may draw from these natural tendencies, but they are not absolutely dependent on them. For example, you probably need to be organized in your job. A person with the “discipline” tendency might find this to be easy. But if you are “competitive,” you might try use your natural tendency to compete to as a way to organize your life “better” than somebody else. As a “learner,” you might try to learn about effective organizational methodologies.

In your job, you might find yourself in a situation that requires a skill that seems at odds with your natural tendencies. You’ve got two solutions: the first is to take the tactic above, and try to figure out how to leverage your natural tendency in a creative way to accomplish your goal.

The second is to get a job that doesn’t require that skill.

Bottom line: success boils down to recognizing your natural tendencies and figuring out a way to leverage them to do what needs doing. In other words, know your audience, even when the audience is you.

I’ve been using the mantra, “discipline“, saying it to myself when I wake up in the morning, when I don’t feel like doing the dishes, when I don’t want to write or I don’t want to do work or I don’t want to run, “discipline, Mark, discipline, discipline, discipline.” I feel like it helps.

But for how long? How long before the novelty wears off, and the mantra becomes just another bit of work I don’t want to do? How long before I lack even the discipline to chant, “discipline“?

Is there an alternative?

Perhaps we’re back to our old friend, ritual.

Think of it as a companion piece, a complement: maybe in the absence of that ramrod-straight steel force of will, we can create structures, rituals, that allow us to reach our goals. Perhaps in recognizing our inherent weakness we can get where we’re going.

Maybe the answer is not “I must have discipline at all times,” but instead “I must have discipline in this moment, enough to do what needs to be done right now, and to check this box off this list, and at other times, I must have discipline enough to write down the list, to set the goal, to evaluate it, and determine if it is worthy of the many tiny acts of discipline that will be required to reach it.”

Maybe that’s the real secret to discipline: that anybody out there with it isn’t carrying the burden of every goal at once, but only the weight of getting to the next step. And if you think about it, those organizations that rely on discipline the most are also those that understand the importance of milestones, of metrics, of rewards. We have military medals, and weigh-ins at the gym, and ranks in the Boy Scouts, and playoffs in sports. They don’t expect their members to do it all at once. Why should we?

So, then, the real secret to discipline seems to be the marriage of discipline and ritual, the creation of structure, the choosing of a goal and appropriate milestones, and then the distinct and discreet application of discipline to each step along the way.

What do you think?