Daily Business Habits: weekly reviews and measurable progress

01

Before you start, and why measuring helps

In simple words

Before this course: The Show Up Every Day System (course 2.2). You already picked a daily move, kept a scoreboard and did a 20-minute weekly review. Now we make that review sharper. If you step on a scale you learn something; if you only guess, you do not. Looking at real numbers every week helps you see what is really happening.

Key facts

This course assumes you finished course 2.2: you have a daily business move, a bad-day minimum, a one-line-a-day scoreboard and a weekly review slot in your calendar.
Harkin and colleagues (2016, Psychological Bulletin) combined 138 experiments (19,951 participants) in which people were encouraged to monitor their progress toward a goal. Monitoring more often led to better goal attainment, with an average effect of d = 0.40 (a small-to-medium effect).
Most of those studies were about health and personal goals, not businesses. So treat the result as a good reason to try tracking, not as a guarantee for your business.
Writing your numbers down is also simply easier to compare week to week than remembering them.
Rule for this course: measure to learn, not to judge yourself. A bad week is information.

Step by step

Open your course 2.2 scoreboard and look at the last 4 weeks.
Count how many days you did your daily move (full or minimum).
Write one sentence: "The last 4 weeks, I did my move ___ out of 28 days."
Write which weekly results you were already tracking (replies, enquiries, sales, sign-ups).
Circle the ones you actually used to make a decision. Cross out the ones you never looked at.
Check: you have a baseline sentence and a short list of numbers you really use.

Watch on YouTube

Beginner's guide to the weekly reviewTodoist · YouTube · youtube.com

Videos by other creators on YouTube, for reference. They are not made by or affiliated with The Future Market.

LESSON 01Before you start, and why measuring helps

LESSON 01 / ANIMATED LESSON / AI VOICE00:00 / 01:00

Voice

Read the video script

[Host] "If you did the first Show Up Every Day course, you already have a daily habit. Now let's measure it."
[Text on screen: 138 studies] "One big review pulled together 138 experiments on tracking progress toward a goal."
[Text on screen: Monitoring more = better results, on average] "On average, people who checked their progress more often reached their goals more often."
[Host] "It is not magic and it is not a promise. It is a good reason to write your numbers down."

Try it now

Write your baseline: how many days out of the last 28 you did your daily move, and which results you tracked. Keep it; you will compare against it in Lesson 5.

ClaudeStuck? Copy a ready-made prompt for Claude

Copy this, open Claude, paste it, and Claude will walk you through the lesson step by step.

For a grown-up: Claude is for adults (18+). Copy this, paste it into Claude, and use the answer to explain the lesson to your child.

I'm learning "Daily Business Habits: weekly reviews and measurable progress" on The Future Market. Lesson 1: "Before you start, and why measuring helps".

What the lesson teaches:
- This course assumes you finished course 2.2: you have a daily business move, a bad-day minimum, a one-line-a-day scoreboard and a weekly review slot in your calendar.
- Harkin and colleagues (2016, Psychological Bulletin) combined 138 experiments (19,951 participants) in which people were encouraged to monitor their progress toward a goal. Monitoring more often led to better goal attainment, with an average effect of d = 0.40 (a small-to-medium effect).
- Most of those studies were about health and personal goals, not businesses. So treat the result as a good reason to try tracking, not as a guarantee for your business.
- Writing your numbers down is also simply easier to compare week to week than remembering them.
- Rule for this course: measure to learn, not to judge yourself. A bad week is information.

The exercise I'm working on:
Write your baseline: how many days out of the last 28 you did your daily move, and which results you tracked. Keep it; you will compare against it in Lesson 5.

I'm stuck. Please:
1. Explain the main idea in plain, simple words with one everyday example.
2. Walk me through the exercise one small step at a time. Ask me what I've done so far before giving the next step.
3. Don't just give me the final answer. Help me do it myself, and check my work when I share it.

I'm a parent helping my child (about 8 years old) with a lesson called "Before you start, and why measuring helps" from the course "Daily Business Habits: weekly reviews and measurable progress".

Here's what the lesson says:
Before this course: The Show Up Every Day System (course 2.2). You already picked a daily move, kept a scoreboard and did a 20-minute weekly review. Now we make that review sharper. If you step on a scale you learn something; if you only guess, you do not. Looking at real numbers every week helps you see what is really happening.

The activity:
Write your baseline: how many days out of the last 28 you did your daily move, and which results you tracked. Keep it; you will compare against it in Lesson 5.

Please explain this so an 8-year-old understands: short sentences, a fun everyday example, and no hard words.
Then give me 3 simple questions I can ask my child to check they understood, and a way to do the activity together, one tiny step at a time.

Open Claude

Sources

Harkin et al. (2016), "Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence", Psychological Bulletin (University of Sheffield repository record): eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/87431/

My notes

I learned this

02