How I use numbers to make better decisions in my day to day life?

Introduction

Why people, including me, don't take better decisions in life?

Most of us learn from failures while the remaining don't learn at all. They repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Taking better decisions require more work, more commitment. Life often events happen too quickly without us having the time to react accordingly. I myself often plateau in most of my goals because I don't track them.

In this post, you can learn how to use numbers to measure and improve your goals.

What's your number?

I once heard the famous motivational speaker and entrepreneur Brian Tracy talking about the importance of having a number when putting goals. For example, if I want to improve my stamina, I can measure the number of steps - I take per exercising session to determine - if I am ready improving or simply guessing, depending on my feelings. In this way, I can track my improvement using such number or metric.

You cannot control what you can't measure.

If I want to be more precise in my metrics, I can note down the measuring number everyday before averaging it at the end of the week. In certain situations, having an average is more accurate than noting the value only once per week. For example, assuming I am trying to determine the shortest route from home to the office and vice versa - if I measure the value for route 1 for a day, and route 2 for another day - the values will probably not be accurate. There might be an incident nearby that skews the numbers for a route. But the remaining days of the week stay consistent.