What is Continuous Improvement?
Let's describe continual enhancement. Continuous progress is a commitment to make incremental adjustments and enhancements every day, with the hope that something important will add up to such small improvements.
Having a broad target is the traditional path to self-improvement, and attempting to take huge strides in order to reach the goal in as little time as possible. In theory, although this may sound good, it often ends in burnout, frustration, and failure. Instead, by slowly and slightly changing our usual daily patterns and attitudes, we can work on quality progress.
The importance of making marginally better choices on a regular basis is too easy to ignore. It isn't impressive to stick with the basics. It is not sexy to fall in love with boredom. It's not going to make waves if you do one percent better.
There is one thing about it though: it works.
How Does Perpetual Progress Work?
We are too frequently persuaded that improvement is only significant if it is correlated with a big, tangible effect. We also place pressure on ourselves to make any earth-shattering transformation that everybody can care about, whether it is losing weight, creating a brand, traveling the globe or some other objective.
Meanwhile, it is not noticeable (and often it is not even noticeable) to change by just 1 percent. Yet, particularly in the long term, it can be just as meaningful. Behind bland ideas and underused observations, change sometimes disappears. You don't need any more details. There's no better plan you need. What you need is to do more of what's already doing.
Improvement is not about doing more things right in certain ways, but about doing less things wrong.
This is a principle called subtraction enhancement, which emphasizes on doing less of what does not work: minimizing errors, lowering difficulty, and deleting the unimportant.
Such samples are here:
Education: stop dumb failures, make less behavioral mistakes.
Investing: never waste money, hold the cost down.
Site Design: The on-page items that distract users are eliminated.
Exercise: Fewer practices are skipped.
Nutrition: Eat less food and is unhealthy.
In the real world, by cutting the downside instead of catching the upside, it is always smoother to increase the results. More functional than addition is subtraction.
Avoiding minor loses is one of the easiest opportunities to make major profits.
By looking forward, we also assess our success. We're setting expectations. For our progression, we schedule achievements. Basically, to a degree, we strive to predict the future.
There is an alternative that is opposite and, I think, more helpful: calculate backward, not forward.
Backward measurement means that you make choices based on what has actually happened, not what you expect to happen.
There are a couple of references here:
Weight Loss: Measure the consumption of calories. Last week, did you eat 3,500 calories a day? Reflect on this week's average of 3,400 a day.
Power Training: Yeah, you squatted 250 pounds last week over 5 sets of 5 reps? Give this week a chance for 255 pounds.
Relationships: How many new individuals have you encountered in the last week? Huh? Zero? This week, concentrate on introducing yourself to a new person.
Entrepreneurship: Last week, you landed just two customers, while your average is five? It sounds like this week you should be focusing on making more sales calls.
Measure backward to get a little better then. Last week, what did you do? How is it possible to boost this week by just a little bit?