What Gets Measured Gets Improved
The tale of how simply tracking what I ate helped me understand the power of Metrics
In 2013 I weighed the most I have ever weighed in my life. I can remember stepping on the Wii Fit and having it audibly proclaim, “You’re obese!” That was a painful observation for this little piece of technology to bestow upon me. How could this happen?
I had tried various methods of weight loss over the years and employed very specific weight loss goals along the way. None of the methods seemed to stick or create any lasting change.
Then 2014 happened.
2014 was perhaps one of the hardest years for me and my family. In just a short amount of time we had a whirlwind of issues which included my wife losing her grandfather to cancer. That experience caused some real reflection on what was important in life and what changes I would need to make to protect those priorities. I found myself finally understanding that real change starts with understanding the “Why” behind your motivation. In the arena of health, it was now clear that my goal wasn’t actually to lose weight but to be healthy and be there for my family. With that knowledge I changed tactics.
It’s Dangerous to Travel Alone
With my renewed focus on self improvement, I was reading everything I could get my hands on and, as a result, stumbled upon this quote:
What gets measured gets improved.
A good friend of mine, Josh Campbell, mentioned he had experienced extraordinary results by simply tracking what he ate. I was in a nerdy, “Excel Happy” phase of my life so I thought, “Why not?” I created a spreadsheet with the intention of simply tracking what food I ate each day.
It was both eye opening and embarrassing. The more my eyes opened, the more embarrassed I was.
I noticed two habits change immediately after I created the spreadsheet. First, simply knowing I would log the food I ate caused me to question eating it. That’s correct. The mere thought of having to log, “Coffee with 8 sugars and 8 milks” helped me realize I was consuming too much sugar. My wife started joking with me, “Would you like a little coffee with that cream and sugar?” I started drinking my coffee black. (I had to get used to the awful taste of the work coffee, but it was free)
That insight alone helped me lose 15 pounds in the first two weeks.
There’s An App For That
The second thing I noticed was Excel was not the best way to track what I was doing. The friend I mentioned earlier also recommended an app called MyFitnessPal, which enabled me to track calories. This was my first taste of metrics. Actual numbers that, once understood, could help you hypothesize, experiment, and improve.
Armed with the knowledge of what I was eating and how many calories were deeply embedded within those morsels, I found myself able to make even more informed decisions. For instance, I learned quickly that I could still go to the local sub shop (Jersey Mike’s anyone?) and enjoy my favorite sandwich so long as I burned some of those calories by doing something like running stairs. I used my step tracker (this was right before the Apple Watch was a thing) to calculate how many flights of stairs it would require to burn a set of calories and boom, I had a recipe for better decision making. On days I was not up to twenty flights of stairs, I opted for a lower calorie lunch.
Tracking the metrics in this case led, organically, to making different decisions. Those decisions led to another 15 pounds gone in four weeks.*
*Allow me to offer a quick disclaimer. I have since learned that, while most of the early pounds were water weight, there is a healthy pace to losing weight. That is another reason making weight loss your goal can be awful. You can do a lot of unhealthy things to lose weight. I’d advise you to seek some nutritional help, which I eventually did.
If you are doing the math, starting by simply tracking what I ate and then finding the right metric (calories) helped me lose 30 pounds in 6 weeks. Former Tristan may have stopped there, but my eyes had been opened to improvement, and I found myself ravenously searching for new metrics that may help me on my health journey beyond weight loss.
The Journey of 1000 Steps Starts With…Steps
The next metric I found was steps. They were, and still are, all the rage when it came to health and wellness. After all, there was really great science1 behind the idea that, based on your age and weight, a certain amount of steps per day could help you achieve your health goals. As I started to track my steps, I started making more informed decisions.
My first step related decision was to park my car in the most remote parking spot of parking lots. I quickly added a, “No elevator rule.” That one was simple because it’s a lot harder to plummet to your death in an elevator if you are, in fact, never in one.
I would quickly incorporate long walks into the routine which led to a passion for running and a cool story about a 5K goal I undertook. (which is the subject of an upcoming Tidbit, stay tuned)
All in all, this journey of metrics resulted in me losing 70 pounds, achieving my ideal weight, but more importantly, beginning the journey of being the healthiest version of myself I have ever been in my life. These days I focus mostly on maintaining my healthy lifestyle and, unlike before incorporating metrics, I have not put the weight back on.
How Does This Relate to Kanban?
I can almost hear you all screaming, “What does this have to do with Agile, Kanban, or leadership?” One of the core values at the heart of each of those realms is continuous improvement. I’ve observed that, without some type of measurements, improvement can be a shot in the dark at best.
Kanban relies on metrics. These metrics are not for leaders to weaponize so they can shame or keep tabs on people. Similarly to the human body, a Kanban system’s metrics allows teams to experiment and ask questions around how well that workflow system is operating. Which is also why metrics should be available to everyone on a team, and not just a select few.
For example, if a doctor uses an instrument to identify a blockage in your heart, he would recommend immediate action to remove that blockage so that normal blood flow flow can resume. In Kanban, metrics are the instrument that would illuminate a blockage, which in Kanban terms would be a bottleneck. As a coach, I would recommend immediate action to remove the bottleneck to restore flow.
I’ve written about this in a previous tidbit, but I worked with a team that started tracking their Flow Efficiency and Cycle Time and, as a result, asked, “What experiment could we run to try and reduce the Cycle Time and enhance our Flow Efficiency?” Simply tracking the metric forced the question which, in turn, forced an experimental, “What if.”
“Okay, I’m sold. Now what?”
Moving forward I am going to be dropping in more content around metrics and how to gain a better understanding of each metric’s value in helping you whip your workflow into shape. Until then, I would ask you to commit to tracking your flow metrics by starting with the following:
Cycle Time - How long it takes a task, work item, or card to make it through your system from the time you pull it to “In Progress” until you mark it as “Done.”
Throughput - How many tasks, work items, or cards you finish in a set period. Start with a week.
Flow Efficiency - Calculate how long the work items in your system are actively being worked versus waiting. For more on this, check out my Flow Tidbit.
Tracking these will force some “what if” questions, and you will start to see some positive things happen on your team.
At the time I initially wrote this article, it had been eight years since I first started tracking my food, and I am actually in the process of tracking again. It has been a fun experience, even after all these years, and I have already been able to start making better decisions once again. Some scientist postulated that simply observing a thing changed it. It’s not for the faint of heart though. In my life long journey of seeking my higher potential, I have observed some pretty ugly things. But, as my friend and fellow coach Shawn Norton once told me, “You gotta keep on learning and keep on growing.”
Until next week,
Happy Tracking
Lee I, Shiroma EJ, Kamada M, Bassett DR, Matthews CE, Buring JE. Association of Step Volume and Intensity With All-Cause Mortality in Older Women. JAMA Intern Med. 2019;179(8):1105–1112. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0899