Don’t Break the Chain: How Jerry Seinfeld measured success

A few months ago, I was reading a write up about Jerry Seinfeld and how he tracked and measured success.

The concept that he shared was to track visually, on a calendar, the days that you complete a task.

For each day that you complete the task, put a red star on the day.  After a while, you’ll see a chain of red stars and the goal then is to ‘not break the chain’.

Click here to download the 2015 calendar in PDF.

What could you track using this system?

It all depends on your goals, and you could also implement one at home, and one for work too.

You could track the days that you:

• go to the gym;
• write a ~500 word blog article;
• clear your emails;
• meet with one of your clients, and so on.

Remember to measure what matters to you and your business.  I wrote an article earlier in the year on ‘The One Number‘ which goes into a bit more detail on choosing a metric to measure like this.

The visual incentive to ‘not break the chain’ is what spurs you on.

Alternately you could use a similar system if it’s only a few times each week that you need to hit your target.  For instance, you probably shouldn’t go to the gym every single day, so you could aim for an average of 5 times per week – and also track this on the calendar.

We’ve put together a template for you to use, for both weekly and monthly goals to track visually.

Also if you’re chasing an editable version of the above calendar to tailor it that fraction more, here’s a link to the editable file.