Be it building a product or building a personal behaviour or trying to get your team aligned on a work, the one thing that I have seen help is having a clear view of where you stand now with respect to the goal you set out to achieve.

This is assuming you have set a goal.

The instance that made me think about it again, recently, was an interaction with a baking business that I mentor. They have been running this business for a while and had all the accounts (sales, categories, customers, etc.) in a notebook. They were meticulous about filling that notebook on a daily basis. When I started talking to them and started asking questions, they would always produce the notebook. The notebook had all the data but no insights.

I built a mini CRM for them in less than a day. After having them test it and a few iterations (an hour with Claude Code) later, we had a CRM tool. Now all their orders are added there. But the CRM tool itself was not the pivotal thing. The charts and insights dashboard on top of that was!.

Now any day it shows you revenue on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis along with what the goal was and what % of the goal was achieved.

One of the founders told me that seeing that dashboard and knowing that this week has been a slow week lights a fire in them to do better.

So, start with a clear measurable goal and then have a dashboard that you can go to on a daily basis.