What Gets Measured Gets Managed for Authors

Please Note: All Credit for the Idea of ‘What Gets Measured Gets Managed’ goes to Peter Drucker, one of the foremost Marketing Gurus of the 20th Century, and to William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), the Scottish physicist

Thanks to A Thinking Person for this beautiful comment from Lord Kelvin

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

Thanks to SAP Blogs for another gorgeous comment from Lord Kelvin

 “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.”

What Gets Measured Gets Managed

The reason that what you measure gets managed is that

1. You start focusing on it. You start paying attention to it
2. By measuring you figure out exactly where you are
3. By measuring you can track whether or not you are progressing towards your goals
4. By focusing on it, you get your subconscious, the universe, and your thoughts all focused on it. You start getting ideas and breakthroughs
5. You know what is going on
   1. If you see improvement, you get motivated and work more
   2. If you see a stall in growth, you feel pain and are incentivized to remove the pain by fixing growth
6. By having figures and numbers, it instantly becomes higher priority over everything else that you don’t have figures for

This last point is Extremely Important

Make Sure You Measure What You Want to Grow and Optimize

The Thing/Area you measure will take over your life, because

1. You are measuring it and have data for it, and data on how it is changing
   1. It is going to be one of the few areas of your business and your life where you have data and have focus. So it takes over priority
2. You are constantly getting pleasure (good increases) and pain (decreases)
   1. Other areas are not getting any feedback, or are getting very little feedback
3. Your focus is on it. Your conscious and subsconscious both are working overtime on it
4. Your motivation will be strong because you know exactly what is going on
5. You will have certainty (because of the measuring and the data) and things that are ‘certain’ take precedence over things that are uncertain

So, you will start ignoring other areas, and start focusing more and more on what you are measuring

Therefore, it is absolutely critical that

1. You correctly identify the most important things you need to grow
2. You measure these things FIRST. Perhaps you measure only these things
3. You realize that things you do measure will get improved, and everything else will get mostly ignored

Great Things to Measure (for Authors)

These are some great things to measure

1. Net earnings after removing costs
2. Hours spent writing and on writing business, and net earnings per hour
3. Net Savings
4. Number of sales
5. Sales per marketing channel and sales per dollar spent on a marketing channel

These are examples of GREAT things to measure

Dangerous Things to Measure (for Authors)

1. Revenues
   1. Only what you EARN matters
2. Hours spent writing
   1.  This is dangerous until and unless you also measure how many books you produce, and what net earnings per hour are (after accounting for expenses)
3.  Vanity measures
   1. Anything you are measuring for personal vanity you should stop measuring

Be very careful, as not only do you waste time measuring things that don’t matter, there is a much bigger danger

1. If you focus on things that are useless (such as hours spent writing), you tend to ignore things that are valuable (net earnings per hour of writing time)

Time is the most precious resource and the most limited resource. Measure only the critical things

Make Sure You Do Not Measure Useless Things

You cannot afford the time or the loss of focus

Make Sure to Measure Every Single Day

The whole power of ‘What Gets Measured Gets Managed’ is

1. Measure the Right Things
2. Measure each day
3. Review every week and every month and every year
4. Keep improving (Kaizen)
5. Keep adjusting what you measure, to make sure you are measuring the right things

The backbone of everything is

1. Identifying the Right Things to Measure
2. Putting in a System to Measure them
3. Measuring Every Single Day