My Quest for a Personal Operations Dashboard

A couple years ago, I did a calendaring experiment. It was such a good experience, and I learned that I had to make some hard decisions and cut some valued activity out. I still go through those calendaring steps often, and I have more flexibility now with my calendar thanks to those changes I made. I can flow more where I need to, and flowing is key to me. I cannot say enough about the value of having regular batches of unstructured time, which help me get enough relaxation, strength building, creativity and ideas, and time to help others. I’ve long realized that unstructured time is critical for teams, at every level in an organization, for the same reasons and benefits, so I track that along with other typical operations factors to help keep team and system health up. So why am I not doing this more in my own life? I surely can extend this practice and apply it to help me live my best life, is my working assumption here.

Many many years ago as an engineering leader, I conglomerated a set of things I needed to watch every week or so to make sure my teams and my systems were in decent shape, that they weren’t backsliding without going undetected, and that we were able to capture the impact of our efforts. That helps me quickly and easily stay on top of things, and make small adjustments early before I need to make big, reactive adjustments later. It’s boring as all get out, as my teams will assure you, but I remind them I’d rather be bored a little along the way more than stressed out a lot in fits and bursts, if I can avoid it.

At a high level for my teams, I regularly watch some leading indicators of those team and system health values. Info like recent incidents and upcoming maintenance windows, costs, and counts and ages of work and support requests – the list will vary some with different teams and products, and as different worries creep up or go away with them, but these are some of the basics I watch universally. I also check in on additional things less frequently like not taking out-of-office, how many undesirable hours worked, and reduced rates of project proposals, as indicators of potential morale and long-term productivity harm.

And to watch them, I use dashboards as much as possible. Dashboards for how my teams are doing (not to shame them if not doing well, but in fact to support them to get to a healthy place), dashboards for how my systems are doing, dashboards for how we’re executing against KPIs. We collect data, we review data, we adjust plans, we keep getting better. In theory ;)  (By the way if you aren’t regularly reviewing your operations, this is a great practice to shift towards more proactive decision making and increasingly curbing chaotic disruptive work.)

So now that I have shifted some of my intense focus on `advancing at career` more towards `advancing at life`, it is time to do these same useful, albeit tedius check-ins regularly on myself.

Figure out my own Six Pack

Nodding to a cliché phrase, six-pack, which refers to visible evidence of one’s core abdominal strength seen as six distinct and defined muscles, I often refer to having a six-pack of core team measurements that will keep us focused on keeping up our most important strengths, and have that be one of the main dashboards I watch over time. So similarly, I want to start with a six-pack for myself.

Calendaring, plus this dashboard experiment I’ve just started, are based on a set of key values. There are no shortage of things that I could watch, but to keep it simple I went right to that big picture I created for myself and continue to refine as time goes on. I haven’t written extensively about this, but I mentioned it in my calendaring experiment as being the core roles and characteristics I value. I came up with them considering characteristics I would want people to use to describe me at my funeral, from what mattered most to me based from lists of humans’ core needs that various people have produced, then I scrapped it all and made up my own, and I probably will shift these again. Just like with core engineering stats for different teams and different times, what matters is that you have some, and watch them.

With some core areas identified, just like we would set up software monitoring with targets and alerting, figure out some precise things to watch for each. Having these handy helps me when I do these dashboard checks will help me quickly and more objectively understand how things are going and if I want to tweak anything I’m doing or not doing. And for sure, there does not need to be exactly six measurements, but it should be a number that is sustainable to gather and review without turning into dread.

Now of course, do I need a dashboard at all? It’s often pretty obvious how I’m doing on various things without thinking too much about it. Where I do find a dashboard incredibly useful is to help me make decisions when I’m facing multiple options or when I’m upset about things not going as well as I would like them to be and getting locked up and not making any decisions. Breaking things down into facts addresses the drama and trauma in my brain, and helps get me moving sooner.

With whatever measurements identified, I do two things with them. First, I assign an impact level to eachI assigned to them based on how each affects me, using a scale from 0 to 4 where 0 is similar to a P0 or priority zero in tech meaning it’s vital, other things depend on it, and deserves all attention if it isn’t healthy.

Next, I map ranges of those measurements’ values to a health valuation on a scale of 1 to 4:

• 1 is healthy
• 2 is some concerns that are being managed
• 3 is large concerns that are escalating
• 4 is unknown or very bad

And where measurements do not exist or are difficult to collect to the point that I wouldn’t repeat them after the first time, I do a self-assessment instead using that 1 to 4 scale.

Flow, Health, and Purpose as an example

As mentioned above, I put a lot of value on having a decent amount of unstructured time which allows me to flow to priorities as needed, to be creative and have time to learn, and balance my life well with leisure time and rest. Of the seven core values I have for myself, Flow is the one that represents that. Health is another core value, which I define as doing sufficient activities to take care of my physical body, like regular strength training, eating a healthy diet, and getting enough sleep. And Purpose is the last one I’ll share for this example, that sees me focusing on being loving and helpful.

I came up with an algorithm that will take my health assessments, compare them to the impact, and clearly indicate what I need to focus on first and foremost.

I’ll repeat this every few weeks, and track them over time. I also plan to use this to inform decisions, considering how they might impact each of these and how much I can afford to have them impacted. The idea is to be more intentional, and not be swayed by the latest feeling or thoughts I have, or worse by not doing anything because I’m worried about all of it all at once!

Stay tuned for updates on how this experiment goes… I intend to do this monthly and report back in three months if I find the activity as useful at home as I found it at work.