Apr 13, 2010

Develop Your Personal Scorecard

One positive outcome of the recession was several organizations gained inner strength by learning to be better at what they are. Growth without inner strength is dangerous. In my case, two things happened last year that made a huge impact. One was attending an NLP based program ‘Born-to-Win’ that helped me to blast off some of my mind-blocks. Another one was developing a Personal Scorecard for me.

Until last year, I had only new-year resolutions. That had some limited success. In 2009 beginning, I set the goals in a particular format. The format has been evolving for several months. Now it is a one page tabular format and I am calling it as my personal scorecard. It has the following headings:

Vision: What I want to be in the long-term? What I want to be known for?

Mission: What is my core purpose?

Objectives: What are my key objectives in the next few years?

Goals: What are my goals for this year?

Strategies (Key Activities): How am I going to achieve my goals?

Measures: Some simple measures of progress towards my goals that can be tracked monthly.

Both strategies and measures are classified under six categories:
  1. Business
  2. Finance
  3. Health
  4. Family
  5. Self-development
  6. Spiritual/Social
Then I have a list of key activities for the month and also a weekly plan for day-to-day tracking (outside the scorecard).

I have found immense value from this personal scorecard. Even though I am not able to complete all the tasks planned, I can see the definite progress that I am making against each of the goals. What matters is almost always getting done. Also I am not neglecting any area of my life and so it is balanced.

You can see a lot of similarities between the Personal Scorecard and the Balanced Scorecard. Instead of the four perspectives in Balanced Scorecard, I am using six perspectives. This approach of ‘six perspectives’ is pretty standard in personal goal setting, if you refer any self-development book.

Initially my personal scorecard was running to a few pages, now it is just one page, and it is really helping me to focus. My personal scorecard used to be an input to my daily affirmations/ meditation. Now-a-days it is an input once in a week. After a few months of its usage, I could find every activity I pick up is influenced by the scorecard. Every month-end I spend about half-an hour reviewing my scorecard which includes updating the monthly metrics and planning for the coming month. It is pretty exciting to watch the progress. Sometimes it creates pain when I don’t achieve the monthly targets, but it serves as an excellent energy booster. The scorecard has become a rich database of monthly info such as active & passive income, number of blog-articles published, books I read, new skills developed, and so on.

You could try developing your personal scorecard if you want to achieve your goals with certainty. There is so much material available in the internet on how to set ‘SMART’ goals. Please let me know if you find any difficulty in developing your personal scorecard.

2 comments:

  1. In what ways, if any, is my InfoGraphic similar to the Personal ScoreCard you talk about, Thomas?

    Link to the InfoGraphic ... http://pradeephenry.com/PH-careermatrix.jpg

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  2. Pradeep, your career matrix is a great depiction of your achievements and gives a map of the road you travelled so far. It is amazing. The picture is artistic and innovative. Congrats!

    The Personal Scorecard is a map for the road ahead.

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