I keep track of my habits and the things I want to do each day on a "Lights Spreadsheet" that looks like the above.
There was a great comment by Adam last week,
"Your spreadsheet tracks target desirable behaviors, which is great, but it doesn't tell you what you did instead if you didn't meet your target..."
It's a very sharp comment -- he goes on to describe how he measures his time and other factors, and how it's useful to him.
Indeed, no form of tracking, measurement, or analytics work in isolation. To really understand what's going, you need a more complete picture. I like the Lights Spreadsheet because a quick glance with the eye tells you what is going well and what isn't, but Adam is dead right that it doesn't tell you everything in isolation.
This week -- Week 6 -- is actually a pretty good indication of that. The four days from May 22nd to 25th are all high production days. The 24th was a little shaky on a few points, but not a big deal.
Then things start coming apart much more on the 26th -- why?
Turns out, I had to travel on the 28th, and I wasn't finding reasonable travel logistics easily. I spent a lot of time on the 26th starting the day dealing with admin and plane tickets. The 27th went okay again once it was more-or-less handled, and the 28th was a transit day where basically none of the best stuff happened.
It's useful to have the Lights Spreadsheet to see exactly where things are falling off, when they're falling off. By starting on the 26th with administrative tasks, I thus didn't make progress on biggest projects and a variety of other things.
On a side note, the hours it took handling travel details and the cascading downside to habits and production makes me think things like Chiara's Location Asia are worthwhile, where she handles flights for you. As a side note, she's doing free calls that are useful to people doing anything in Asia or business, and very smart. You might want to grab one while she's still doing it.
But, I digress. The first half of the week was pretty standard; the second took some damage because plans had not been far enough in advance, and a hectic travel schedule. Not a big deal, but good to note. I bought my onward flight leaving Istanbul as soon as I saw a decent one, and it's a not-crazy itinerary that'll let me not really lose any productive time en route back to China. I maybe could've pieced together a better itinerary, but as soon as I saw a decent one on Emirates, I just snapped it up so as to not have to deal with those sorts of days in early July.