Constant Improvement

"Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer" - Rick Pitino

For me its impossible to not try to improve in whatever I'm doing.  Whether it was figuring out the most efficient way to fill orders when I worked at Bar Louie while still flirting with a certain waitress (who is still dating me 3 years later) or optimizing the number of clicks it took to open an account at IB, I find a need to be constantly improving.

A  few months ago I was stuck on a project where we had a list optometry facilities across the nation and we were supposed to google the facilities and fill into a spread sheet the name of the physicians at each office.  I don't think I need to tell you how incredibly boring this is.  While I did find a few gems like Thomas Turtle, the majority of my day was spent googling name after name after name after name.  As a testament of how bored I was, I began to keep stats on my self to see how many records I could get in 15 minutes and compare against my personal best.  I evaluated trends to see if I was more earlier or later in the day then graphed my self over time to see my progress.

While this all seems ridiculous, its the only way that I would keep myself engaged enough to get through it.  I knew that it was unlikely that I was improving, but I needed to see myself making progress on something.  Just seeing the numbers add up of how many I had completed made me feel like I had accomplished something to show for my hours of labor.

I compare this experience to times when I have more work than I feel like can ever get done in one day and the strange thing is that I'm happier being busy.  Being busy can be a blessing because before you look at the clock its already 4pm (although sometimes that just means you're going to be there even later).  Doing good work is gratifying and doing repetitive work is not.

The key question here is how do you motivate yourself to do something boring / repetitive.  I decided to make a game out of it and then keep intricate stats.  It proved just enough of an incentive to keep me focused (ish) and motivated to keep working.  We all need to see progress and need to feel a sense of achievement in order to feel that our work is valuable.