Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
But what happens when things are hard to measure?
For our health, this could be body fat percentage, protein intake, or increases in strength training.
In our work, this could be how we’re improving our communication, or supporting other members of our team.
In our homes, this could be how empathetic we’re being to those we care about most.
Some things are either 1) impossible to measure (e.g., love), or 2) take a lot of effort to measure (e.g., tracking calories).
So, what then?
This is when direction beats precision.
If we can measure something well enough to understand it’s general direction—or trend—over time, then that’s usually good enough. We don’t gain much from the added precision.
When I lost 10kgs about 3 years ago, I used callipers to measure my skin folds to track my change in body fat percentage. The callipers would never be able to tell me my exact body fat percentage at a single moment in time, but after measuring for a few weeks, I was able to see that I was travelling in the desired direction.
When things are hard to measure, life gets easier when we focus more on direction than on precision.