I’m gonna tell you about my recent experience in potty training.
Why? I’m assuming most of you are NOT about to begin potty-training someone, so why share this?
To be honest, it’s because this whole experience has been a huge lesson for me. Its really brought home the value of tracking our daily progress, especially when the task is daunting or otherwise difficult.
Our minds don’t naturally operate well on large scales or large timeframes. Tasks that are physically or mentally taxing tend to focus our minds on the moment, further exacerbating this blind spot. Potty training my toddler reminded me of this first hand.
Since early December we’ve taken Jake to sit on the potty 469 times! With a timer going off every 30 min. to remind us to sit on the toilet, it was VERY hard to notice, let alone celebrate the incremental progress being made day to day.
Enter – tracking
At the start I used a simple table to help me track some core outcomes each day;
Entering this data took seconds, but it gave me a semblance of control as we tromped through the trenches of potty training each day.
More importantly, over time these little notes became a huge source of optimism and the input we needed to know when we needed to make a pivot in how we were approaching this particular process change.
Potty-Training by the Numbers
At the end of each week I’d quickly aggregate the key stats and compare them to the prior week. This gave me a view into how Jake was progressing and when he was ready to advance to the next phase. As you can see below, we definitely had our set backs.
Over time however, this was a lifeline – it helped me to see the improvement and the clear impacts of changes we made in his schedule helping to see patterns I otherwise would have missed.
TL;DR
Do you know the parable/anecdote about the three blind men who try to describe the elephant? When it comes to process changes that occur incrementally over months, we can often be all three blind men, just spread out over time instead of spatially. To avoid process vertigo and keep yourself motivated –
Pick a point in the distance, describe it with a metric, and measure against it periodically.
Happy incrementally changing!