Tracking Your Progress

This is Writing Boss, the podcast about becoming the right kind of manager for a creative person.  Yourself.  Because the only difference between writing for fun and writing for a living is the boss.  I’m Wendy Kays, and this episode is about tracking your progress every day.

During the massive research project that resulted in their book “The Progress Principle,” Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer discovered that a large number of managers feel their management work is a distraction from their real work, and a waste of time.  Those managers thought their company would be better served if they were spending their time doing what their employees were doing instead of managing.

Some of them probably still think that.  Even managers being paid to commute every day to a company building and manage people don’t often feel like their job is real work, or worthwhile.

Yet the results of Teresa and Steven’s research project clearly showed that “most contemporary work is impossible without strong and savvy management support.”   Everyone, no matter what they do for a living, wants a good boss who is a qualified and experienced as a manager, and enjoys supporting his or her people.

By the same principle, without strong and savvy self-management support, our work as writers is impossible.  We want a patron who enjoys supporting us, and is good at it.

Yet I still feel putting on my management hat is a waste of time.  I just want someone else to do it.  I don’t want to waste time writing in a journal about progress and setbacks every day.  I don’t want to.  I just don’t want to!

How am I supposed to manage myself (and my work) every day when I feel so negative about doing it?

Because it’s going to save me the time and anguish of trying to do and be a bunch of other things I don’t want to do and would be terrible at.  All while magically transforming me over time into the way more mature, capable and insightful person I’m definitely not right now.

Record keeping is going to save me from the torture of faking it until I make it.  I can just be who and what I am, and have that be enough right now, today, every day.

I know you’re as skeptical as I am.  So I’ll walk through it for you…and me, too.

Keeping a business journal is not a waste of time if I’m recording the right things.  It’s hard to know if I’m in a progress loop or hitting a negative loop unless I’m keeping track of those right things over time.  As Teresa and Steven put it, “sustaining virtuous cycles requires recognizing them to begin with.”  A progress loop is so magical because it’s a string of successes to feel good about instead of just one success from yesterday.

And let’s be honest, here.  With a day job and so many things to do every day other than writing, one day blends into another and it’s hard to remember specific writing successes unless they were massive, unforgettable wins.  And the details of even those fade pretty fast.  I can’t tell you how long it’s been since my last win, even though I remember the win itself.  I can’t tell you if I’ve had little successes every day since, or if I’ve fallen out of my loop.  All I know is how I feel right now, and those feelings color my memory of the past week, month and year.  My successes are either dragged down in importance or forgotten.  Or they’re put on a pedestal and exaggerated.

The same thing happens to my memories of setbacks.  I either remember them as worse than they were, or forget them entirely, unless I’m holding onto an outsized grudge.

Teresa and Steven suggest the best way to stay in the progress loop, and make it easier to get back into one if I fall out, is to keep track of my progress and obstacles I’ve overcome.  I can review specific successes as facts with dates, see how long they’ve been chaining, and if I’m having a crummy day, find out what led to the crash and if I’ve beaten the problem I’m having before.  I can see, objectively, that I’ve had success.  Even if I’m emotionally blind due to ego, frustration, rage or depression.

The written record will even out the stormy seas and keep me more objective.

Because of its objectivity and perfect recall, a record of past successes and setbacks can be a shortcut to rising again after the same few problems regularly cut me down at the knees.  It can help me spot new problems that I haven’t dealt with before.  A record can also highlight which writing and production processes worked for me, so that after I get my first book or second, or twentieth done, I can see a way to make the job more efficient or fun next time.   A record can also be a useful reminder of who helped me along the way so I can include them in my acknowledgements.  I can check it for specifics and dates if I write a memoir, or am interviewed about my work.

But in even in the short term, Teresa and Steven promise that keeping track of progress and setbacks every day will give me insight.  I’ll begin to see clearly what’s really going on with myself and my company every day and why.  They say keeping a record increases mindfulness when it comes to remembering my goals and finding ways to achieve them.

And mindfulness is so fashionable right now.

In addition to these benefits, keeping a daily record can help me see how I affect my teammates and my team’s performance.  It can give me ideas about interpersonal difficulties and how to improve interpersonal interactions at work.  I can see how my work was affected by various events, and discover my own style and strengths.  Apparently, I’ll also spontaneously change my behavior based on these insights.

Whether I’m dealing with different parts of myself doing different jobs or outside freelancers and other writers as an entrepreneur, that’s pretty helpful.  I might feel like I work alone, but the truth is that I’m managing myself and deal with customers and contractors all the time.  A better relationship with any or all of these would be great.

However, even if I wasn’t going to get any of those benefits, the research of James Pennebaker, L.A. King, and J.M. Smyth in the last few decades has shown that people in many different situations can benefit from writing regularly about what happens in their lives.  When you write about traumatic or stressful things, you get a stronger immune system and better health, and a greater sense of well-being.  Writing helps college students adjust better and people who have been laid off to find employment more quickly.  In one experiment, people who wrote about their imagined “best possible self” for four days in a row reported feeling significantly higher levels of well-being by the end compared to people who didn’t do the writing.

Keeping a daily record of successes and setbacks can help me deal with the emotional sturm and drang of being a writer and an entrepreneur.

Writing has power.  We already know that.  So why should I be so reluctant to use that power in every way possible, to change my life in addition to the lives of my readers and listeners?

Okay.  I’m ready to benefit, now, from my own writing.  But how exactly do I do that?

I do what Teresa and Steven had their study participants do.  At the end of the day, I have a short, private interview with myself to answer the same few questions.  Teresa and Steven have provided a list of starter questions they suggest you change over time to fit your personality or business better.

These questions are:

• What event stands out in my mind from the workday?
• How did it affect my inner work life?
• What progress did I make today?
• How did that affect my inner work life?
• What nourishers and catalysts supported me and my work today?
• How can I sustain them tomorrow?
• What one thing can I do to make progress on important work tomorrow?
• What setback did I have today?
• How did that setback affect my inner work life?
• What can I learn from it?
• What toxins and inhibitors impacted me and my work today?
• How can I weaken or avoid them tomorrow?
• Did I affect my colleagues’ inner work lives positively today?
• How might I do so tomorrow?

I’ll remind you here that catalysts and nourishers are the words Teresa and Steven use to refer to the mirror opposites of inhibitors and toxins.  Inhibitors are work-related problems and toxins are relationship-related problems.  So an inhibitor is an unclear goal, and a catalyst is a clear goal.  A toxin is someone disrespecting your work, and a nourisher is someone respecting your work.

You might see already how you want to rephrase the questions for yourself.  You might already be scribbling down some revisions.

But before you use your mad writer skills to polish questions created by a researcher and a developmental psychologist, let’s focus first on what you do with the answers to those questions every day.  Apparently, taking ten minutes to slap the answers on the page isn’t the whole job.  We’re supposed to take an extra five minutes after we have the answers to think about them a little longer.

Remember mindfulness?  Taking time to savor?  This is how we learn that part in five minutes a day.

If the day was a good one overall, think about why and bask in the glow of it.  Enjoy the sense of accomplishment and success.

If the day was a bad one, don’t just throw it in your mental trash can and stalk off.  No matter how bad it was, try to find any progress you made.  Most days, you’ll be able to find something, and you may be surprised by what you actually accomplished.  Also, think about what caused the day’s setbacks.  If you ran into trouble because writing a book is complicated, channel your frustration into a plan of action for dealing with whatever craft problem you ran into.  Appreciate the good side of having truly challenging work instead of a boring job you just drudge through every day.  Think about what you can learn from the setback, and then count the lessons you learned as progress for the day.  Allow yourself to enjoy a sense of accomplishment, even if the only progress you made was what you learned and will be ready and able to apply tomorrow.

At the end of each month, scan through what you wrote.  Do you see any patterns or trends over time?  Ask yourself what they might lead to.  You may like what you see and be encouraged.  However, you also may not like what you see.  You might need to make some changes in how you are doing things.

However you polish or edit the end of the day questions, keep the focus on concrete events and not just inner feelings.  That way, you can see things you might otherwise miss, figure out what to do about what is actually happening, and take more control tomorrow and then next day.  If you do a good job at keeping your daily record and acting on what you learn there, you automatically grow into a better manager, a bigger contributor to your business, and a more accomplished professional.

Yes, we will hate keeping our record some days.  Maybe most days.  But Teresa and Steven’s research shows we’ll end up grateful we did it down the road.  Time to reflect is rare.  It’s hard to carve out time for reflecting and pondering without making an effort.  But if we do, we enrich our own lives and do a better job serving our customers and communities.

And I’m pretty delighted that for once I’m not being hit with the expectations of being more zen and mature than I am up front.  Ten minutes of answering questions and five thinking about those answers is a way more doable than pretending I’m someone I’m not.  Or, that I have skills I don’t.  And if I answer questions and think every day, with a little extra reading and thinking once a month, I can have zen and maturity dawn on me for real over time.  Nice!

I’ll become a better manager without having to make a nosebleed effort to do it.

So I’m going to make the minutes for a short interview with myself at the end of the day.  Every day.

There’s no way to make a problem-free bubble for myself.  Failure is definitely inevitable along the path to creative innovation.  However, keeping track of progress and failure so I can learn from frustrations and mistakes will help create the climate of emotional safety a creative worker needs to do her best work.

I can’t promise myself a safe bubble to work in, but I can promise myself no blame or shame when I run into trouble.  If I’m keeping a daily routine of checking in, I can catch myself feeling blame and shame early.  I can practice healthier responses more often.

As a manager, I must support my writer’s inner work life.  But I also have to take care of the inner work life of my manager self.

Management responsibility can take a toll on your emotions and how you see things.  Teresa and Steven’s research on employee inner work life showed that even when the manager and the worker are two different people, their inner work lives mirror each other when they work closely together.  The manager feels terrible when the workers experience setbacks and delays, and gets an emotional boost from the worker’s progress.  So when the writer in you is moving ahead and making progress, the manager in you feels like she’s moving ahead and making progress.

That’s great when it’s a progress day, but how do you cope with being in the manager mindset and feeling removed and helpless when it comes to the hands on the keyboard work?  How do you support your managerial self’s inner work life?

According to Ann Mulcahy, who took over Xerox when it was in shambles and pulled it back from the brink, you take no more than five minutes at the end of the day to review the events of the day and the work you’ve done.  You focus on what you could accomplish, no matter how small and know you’ve done your best.  Then, she says, “be at peace and get up the next day.”

It doesn’t matter if you write your answers in a journal, a logbook, a chart, a spreadsheet, or in company meeting notes.  It doesn’t matter if you’re using paper or software.  What matters is answering those questions every day, and spending the minutes to think about the answers.

Ann pulled Xerox back from the brink one day at a time.  She fought against filing company bankruptcy and terrible employee morale.  Xerox made it.  All it took was one hard day after another of supportive, qualified management, and a company of people who worked hard because they believed what they were doing was worthwhile and would eventually be successful.

There was no magic wand.  Just a best effort every day and a journal entry at the end of it to think over and learn from.

I can do that, and so can you!

Thanks for listening to Writing Boss.  We’re more than halfway through the school summer break in the U.S.!  You can read these episodes as a blog at WritingBoss.com, and email me at WendyKays@WritingBoss.com.  Please leave a review if you like the podcast, and if you don’t, there are plenty of other great podcasts out there to discover that will fit your needs and personality better.

Have a great summer, and I’ll see you next Monday!