How to Measure Progress When You Don’t Know What You’re Doing
How come it seems like everything you want most out of life requires you to do something you don’t know how to do? I would say this is the first obstacle for anyone with ambition to overcome. It’s a rite of passage.
You want to start a podcast, but you have no clue how to make the audio quality good. You want to write a book, but you haven’t written a thing over 1000 words since college. Or maybe you simply just want to be better than yesterday and have no idea what better looks like.
Obviously, the best advice for starting any new endeavor where you must start as a clueless beginner is to just make a little progress every day. However, progress requires real work, and as I wrote yesterday all work is not real. Here in lies the conundrum… Progress requires work, but only the work that creates real progress is real work. What’s more, since you don’t know what you’re doing you don’t know what defines progress.
This is why measuring progress is so critical!
However, how can you measure progress if you don’t know what you’re doing? The truth is you can’t at first. At best you can guess, at worst you get stuck in analysis paralysis and do nothing.
That is why the first thing you should do is to talk to people who have already done something like what you’re trying to do. If you can’t find someone to talk to directly, then you must learn everything possible about these people through research. While research is not preferred, it’s better than nothing.
What you’re trying to find out through these discussions and research is how to break down what you’re trying to do into multiple small steps. The smaller the better. Ideally each step should be achievable within an hour or two. Each small step must be a logical step forward to completion. What’s more, this logic must be logic you understand down to the nuts and bolts, not just concepts.
These small logical steps then become how you measure progress. Anything less than completing one of these steps is not progress. Therefore, measuring progress is a product of finishing things that matter. It’s that simple.