Get a Dashboard if your Self-Improvement isn’t taking off

Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash

No the cover page isn’t a self-improvement dashboard, however a dashboard for self-improvement would feature similar characteristics: graphs, charts, numbers, statistics, and other indicators you want to measure about yourself.

A dashboard type of a diet-plan website, telling me where my body stands and the potential impact of improvement.

Why is Self-Improvement Hard for Beginners?

Managing oneself is pretty hard. Self-improvement is even harder. It is hard not because it is a fabled monstrosity that many a heroes have fallen in the attempt of conquest, transformed by the beast as that grown-up you meet at gatherings telling you tales about their life’s failures that you don’t want to hear.

Self-improvement is hard because no one is giving you an interface for yourself. You may have sketchy ideas about improving your: personality type, finances, relationships, learning and whatever aspect you fancy. Truth is, those imaginations last only for the night, until you wakeup next morning with a fresh-load of things to take care of in your existing responsibilities.

This has a draining effect on your mental capacity because you want to improve yourself, and not invent a way to improve yourself. Next, you search the internet for self-improvement plans or templates, and the next thing you know is ads for those things popping up on your Instagram and Facebook, or if you had the odd chance to browse the template library of one of Microsoft’s Office products.

Be honest, how many of those have worked out? Likely none. The reason they haven’t worked out because none of those self-improvement worksheets or tools relate to your current circumstances and priorities.

Do you need a separate MBA/diploma in learning how to fill out this sheet or do you want to cut to the chase and improve yourself?

Elements for a Self-Improvement Dashboard

A couple common reasons impeding individuals from pursuing self-improvement are: time, finances, mental capacity, social-environment.

The recipe to begin self-improvement is listed in order:

1. Retreat to a conducive environment that allows you greater autonomy. This may just be yourself.
2. Cut your losses taxing your mind. You’ll only focus when there aren’t things troubling you in your head.
3. Get some financial security. It’s going to come down to you depending on someone, either: a spouse, your parents, or siblings. If it can’t be any of those, then it has to be your savings. No other way.
4. Allocate time to self-improvement, and it’ll manage everything about you by itself. More on this later.

Relatable elements for self-improvement are listed here after.

Finances

Your finances will likely be your first priority to improve, and also the easiest to measure. Elements making up the interface for your Finances can be:

1. Income Tracker
2. Expenses Tracker
3. Needs, Wants, and Demands Priority Tracker
4. Debt Tracker

A example of my Needs, Wants and Demands Priority Tracker.

Goals

Goals lay the roadmap for your choices. While Finances are listed first because they are less complex to build an interface for, your finances need to be driven by your goals as with everything else you will want to improve about yourself.

The interface for goals is simple:

1. It needs to be a list of clearly understandable points that make sense.
2. Each goal must have a tracker you can easily switch back-forth between.

An example of my goals for 2021. I labelled it strategy because I ordered them as a priority sequence.

Activities

Lets face it, tracking or managing one’s activities is the hardest. Whenever you come to terms with tracking and then managing your activities, the following interface elements will make sense:

1. Priorities Calendar — Time management is a bad place to start. You can’t manage time unless you learn how to manage priorities. The most sensible way to manage priorities is filling a calendar on Outlook or Google (or any similar tool) with Priority Blocks (or work/task blocks). Here’s the simple rule: start this with your workplace before implementing on yourself. Once you are in a habit of doing this, it will be significantly easier to translate to your persona life.
2. Routine Tracker — A Routine Tracker will only work once you have been using your Priorities Calendar for a couple months without any complaints. The Routine Tracker builds on top of the Priorities Calendar, by categorically measuring your frequently carried out activities. Allowing you to review the amount of time you are spending on each activity, and if that makes sense for you to carry on.
3. Goals Tracker — The next progression of tracking activities is the Goals Tracker. You can’t have a Goals tracker unless you have a Routine Tracker that has accumulated at least 3 months of data of your lifestyle. The goals tracker interface allows you to identify which of your activities make sense to spend the amount of time that you are. You can use this information as a comparison to decide routine activities that directly contribute as effort to your desired outcomes for goals.

An example of my Priorities Calendar for my Work Routine from earlier this year.

Things you can categorically build and track a routine.

Learning

Unfortunately the trend of individual behaviour observed in recent years leading up to 2021 — learning a skill, ability or personality trait has significantly depreciated in quality. There is an enormous wealth of information out there, but not many people chart a learning course all the way through. This is because learning requires commitment (and consistency), discipline and patience.

If you are successful with managing the Priority Calendar, Routine Tracker and Goals tracker for your activities for at least 6–10 months since you first began, then chances are you already bear features of commitment (consistency), discipline and patience.

Should you try to rush and jump straight to an interface for learning without bearing any of those qualities, you are exhausting your mental capacity that will only add anxiety and frustration, and take you no where near.

Interface elements for Learning are:

1. Learning sources — Make your own library by categorising your sources of learning. This can be your Kindle, Nook, or even a simple spreadsheet with hyperlinks to your learning sources (e-books, YouTube videos, Coursera, Brilliant etc).
2. Learning Notes/Journal — Goes without saying. Speed reading, infinite scrolling on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/TikTok and watching YouTube videos have unfortunately dumbed down the attention span for pretty much everyone. You do not have magical powers to instantly remember and then digest the information (learn) unless you dial down to a pen and paper (or tablet) to scribble your notes. And no, typing on a keyboard /keypad doesn’t count as taking notes.
3. Thoughts — Here’s when you can use a keyboard/keypad. Once you understand and learn, you think. Thought processes learning, associating your notes with your imagination, which you need to record for later review.
4. Ideas —Your idea was originally a thought, which arose out of observations (including learning). The Thoughts you digitised, need next steps — are you creating value in this world, how do you carry it out, what’s it going to be like? When your idea is based out of a natural progression from notes to thoughts, you will feel greater ownership of your idea.

Example of how this thought piece came about through my interface for Ideas. Read my other Article of Needs, Wants and Demands

Relationships

There are almost no notable examples of a relationship management interface outside of computer games, with the exception of organised crime syndicates and companies that can afford a quality CRM for their sales teams.

Relationships are important, as much as the common working-class public would ignore them. There are countless ways to track relationships; computer games or table top role-playing games offer some inspiring examples.

Some core elements to consider for your interface:

1. Network — A list of people identified for their abilities/usefulness/trade.
2. Comrades/Lieutenants/Inner Circle — The closest individuals you can count on, sizing up the power differential between you and them, their abilities, and opinions of each other about things you agree/disagree on.
3. Advisors — Experts you can call up for brainstorming sessions.
4. Mentors — Individuals identified by ideological tenets, culture-fitness and alignment that you take inspiration from.

Interface example of relationship with people in the game My Time at Portia.

Interface example of opinion held by members of the council in the game Crusader Kings 3.

Get a Dashboard for yourself

I found self-improvement insanely hard to start until I developed an interface for myself over the years, allowing better visibility about myself which I could then configure and have no problems in following.

My example of a dashboard. I use Microsoft OneNote which allows cross-functionality with Microsoft Excel and other Microsoft Software, while being operable on my computer, and syncs with the cloud to become easily accessible from any other device in real-time.

There are several ways you can build/get a dashboard for yourself. Some may see this as borderline OCD. It can become one if you don’t understand yourself and the purpose of an interface. When your demons are in line, having an interface makes it significantly more convenient to pursue self-improvement.

Should it fancy you to contribute to the Dashboard I’m developing for Self-Improvement or just learn more about it, the best way to reach me is:

• comment under this piece;
• message me on Linkedin or,
• email me at: zein.saeed.5@gmail.com