Advanced Analytics & Research Lab is a hybrid data service and solutions firm that specializes in working with SMEs to help them boost their data analytic strategies and capabilities. For this article, we decided to not look at analytics for SMEs, as the benefits have already been widely reported. Instead, let’s talk about your life, and how you can use analytics to improve yourself. Warning: This might get a little nerdy!
Two quick hypotheses before we get started:
- Everyone has a lot going on in their lives
- Everyone has some desire to improve themselves
Analytics is all about using data to help you make informed decisions. Every day, people make thousands of decisions, big and small, that can either be conscious (do I buy a latte or a cup of tea), or unconscious (should I eat breakfast). If it’s true that everyone has some desire to improve themselves (as shown by the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry), the question becomes how we can properly use analytics to make better decisions, as all of these little decisions truly add up over time.
Admittingly, I am not a philosopher nor a psychologist, but I am good with analytics, and I’m intrigued about doing things the mathematically optimal way. When I started AAARL, it was difficult to have a true work-life balance as I was completely focused on the business.I spent (and still spend) a lot of my time trying to figure out the things that are most important to me and how well I am performing in them. That’s when I decided to turn to analytics. I wanted to figure out what’s important to me, set initial goals, measure and analyze how I spend my time, and set new goals and strategies to better myself and properly utilize my time!
This exercise helps me continuously improve my life, so I thought I would share my three simplified steps of how you can use analytics in your daily life!
1) Measure what’s important to you:
Every new year, people set new goals for themselves. Often, it can be quite difficult to determine how you are doing against these goals.
Whether it is your diet, fitness, money, or time, there are a plethora of mobile/cloud/computer applications out there to help you track what’s important to you. I track my time on an hourly basis every day. It’s not super accurate but it serves as a bit of a daily reminder for me to be conscious of how I spend my most precious commodity, and ensure that I never forget what’s most important to me.
Here’s some other analytics I do on myself:
- Time tracking (Excel, broken out by categories. Work time is tracked down to the minute)
- Fitness (smart watch paired to my Google fitness app)
- Money (Mint tracks my spending)
- Toothbrush (I use the Oral B Genius series and their mobile app)
- Diet (I don’t track my diet since I eat almost the same thing everyday. However, I know a few apps that track diet but it’s done manually).
- Phone and app usage (located in the new android settings, under digital well-being or app and notifications)
- Inter-temporal planning what I want to do in my 20s vs my 30s and how my financial decisions impact that
Above is an example of my time tracked in 2020. The pandemic means that I had an odd year in terms of time spent on normal extra-curricular things.
2) Analyze performance:
Once you have a tracking process in place, then you can review your metrics on a recurring basis. For example, below is my time outside of work. I use it to identify what I’m doing too much or not enough of. It’s also useful for seeing/organizing how my priorities change as time goes on.
Above is a graph tracking my non-work time
3) Set new goals and strategies
Once I have identified areas of improvement, I set goals to improve myself. It takes a lot of reinforcement – sticky notes on doors, mirrors, reminders in calendars ….etc.
Improving is a gradual process and sometimes it can be hard to detect, which can be discouraging. Tracking your time, however, allows you to know for certain that you’re on the right track.
Final Word
It absolutely takes commitment to implement analytics into your life. But if managing your time, diet, money, physical and mental health is important to you, analytics can be a really good addition to your self-improvement journey. I know it’s a bit of an emotionless way of looking at things, but it certainly does uncover insights into various parts of my life I wouldn’t have even thought about.
Just like your life, your business can also be improved through the use of analytics. You must find out what’s important to track for your business, properly analyze it, and set new goals and strategies to improve your bottom line. At AAARL, we can help you do that! We specialize in collaborating with your team, addressing your data analytic challenges and goals, using our pre-built solutions, and customizing them to meet your specific needs, and then implementing these tools into your organization. Reach out today if you have any interest!
