Hughs Blog

Keep your promises II

OK, accountability time. On April 22nd I promised to track my promises (what I made, what I kept and what I totally blew away) and get back to you. Well, here are the results.

First what I noticed. Keeping track of you promises for a week is an interesting experiment! I started with four columns: Family, Personal, Fitness and Work. Next I recorded each promise that I made to myself or to others under the appropriate column and, lastly, I marked whether I kept it, or not.

In an average day I was making two to three promises an hour easily. But I wanted to keep track of the bigger ones, which was about six a day. Typical ‘big’ promises were: call home to see how I can help with picking up daughters after work, making dinner for the family, getting taxes filed on time, writing a proposal for a client, etc. Again, it seemed like about six of these were happening every day.

At the end of week my score was an average 80% success rate, or one promise on average a day I messed up on. On the surface these are not bad numbers (I’d be happy if the Vancouver Canucks had won 80% of their games!). But what I was shocked to notice was I couldn’t make it through a day without breaking a big promise!

And the lesson for me is that better is possible and that (especially given that we’re only talking about six a day) I can reach 100% just by treating each promise made with more attention. Excuses are easy, but excuses don’t build the kind of character that I would be proud of.

So, how about you? How important are you making promises? And what can you do to ramp it up a notch and have come 100% days?

Tags: culver