Welcome! Thank you for wanting to be better today than you were yesterday. I hope this system helps you along your journey. Find a helpful Substack post introducing this dashboard and how to use it. Start there first.

This guide will explain how the personal tracking spreadsheet and dashboard are constructed in detail along with ways to customize everything to your liking. To see an example dashboard, please see Personal Dashboard.

Table of Contents:

Motivation (Why this system?)

Purpose

I designed this system to keep myself on track with both my work and my personal goals, which I've found are intimately related. What I wanted was quite simple. I wanted some system that allowed me to:

• quantitatively define goals on a daily, weekly, and quarterly basis (and easily update them as needed). For example, I wanted to set a goal of exercising for 30 minutes a day, and completing it 75% of the time or more over a quarter. I also needed to be able to update this as my priorities change and I learn more about what contributes to my productivity and happiness. (e.g. to 15 minutes a day on 90% of all days).
• quantitatively define key metrics to measure my success both: 1) in meeting my goals and 2) in translating my goals to meaningful personal improvement. It was also critical to be able to change these metrics and add new ones. For example, I wanted to combine all of my daily goals into a "Day Score" to measure my success that day. I also needed to be able to update the calculation for that score (e.g. by weighting goals by importance).
• quickly report my progress. I wanted something that would take no more than 10 minutes a day to use and would minimally interrupt my workflow. It's not helpful to create a dashboard to track progress if the dashboard itself becomes a distraction!
• view my progress in real-time, inside of my existing workflows. I wanted something that would instantly update with each new set of data and would force me to see my key metrics and progress towards them on at least daily basis. This was critical to gamify the experience and make it possible to share with other people (e.g. close friends) to keep me on track.
• easily use graphs and statistics to learn what activities really matter. I wanted a system that let me ask questions like "How does the amount of sleep I get impact my productivity?" to better understand the factors that affect my well-being. This was essential to help me improve over time and refine both the quantitative goals I wanted to track and the weighting of those goals in key metrics like "Day Score."
• inexpensive to implement and easy to maintain. I wanted the system to be either free or extremely inexpensive, and I needed it to be something I could trust to be stable over time. This ruled out software built by young startups, for example, that may not be available in a couple of years.

I tried a ton of off-the shelf solutions, but none fit my needs. If this was important to me, I had to build my own. This system is the result.

Philosophy

At a philosophical level, I measure myself by two key metrics:

1. productivity. My productivity directly corresponds to how much impact I can make on the world. I care deeply about creating positive change, so it's essential for me to maximize my productivity. When defined at an adequately broad level, this inevitably becomes a subjective metric — and therefore I treat it as such. What do I mean by that? You can easily define productivity in a narrow task (e.g. how many emails can you answer in an hour?) but that's not the level I want to measure. I want to know how productive my actions are in carrying me to my goals, whether personal or professional. In this context, spending an hour writing emails during a workday may be only mildly productive (a 6-7 out of 10), while spending an hour deeply defining a strategy for my blog on the weekend may be highly productive (8-9 out of 10). You could easily disagree with that assessment, and that's exactly my point. It's subjective, and it should be if it's to be a meaningful metric to you.
2. happiness. Like productivity, happiness is highly subjective and should be treated as such. There's a short-term component — how good I'm feeling in the moment — and a long-term component — "eudaimonic" happiness, a feeling of satisfaction with my life. There's also many, many factors that affect both components, including time spent with loved ones, time spent with friends, my job, my sense of purpose, etc.