Creating the Perfect Day

The question is not

"Am I better than you?"

The question is:

Am I better today than I was yesterday?
Am I better this week than I was last week?
Am I better this month than I was last month?
Am I better this year than I was last year?

If you can answer "Yes" to the last four questions, you have nothing to fear, nothing to envy, and no apologies to make to anyone!

Found in the Instruction Manual of the Pull Your Own Weight program - a program designed to teach school-aged children to perform conventional pull-ups as a means of naturally eliminating childhood obesity.

It's kind of crazy how you can be focused on something and related resources come along from the oddest places. The last couple of days I have been working in my free time to reinstitute a personal accountability system that I had lost quite a while ago when the battery on my palm pilot died. The original system was a simple spreadsheet designed to help me cope with the many day-to-day things that I always seem to forget or simply did not plan time to do.

As a member of the LDS church, I have been taught since I was a child of the many things that would help me draw closer to God and bring His spirit into my home. They have included morning and evening personal, couples and family prayer; personal, couples and family scripture study; holding weekly Family Home Evenings; serving faithfully as a Home Teacher and in other callings; paying an honest Tithe; keeping a journal on a regular basis; exercising the talents and skills I have been blessed with as well as developing new ones; being a good steward of the financial blessings I receive and more. While I have been good in all these areas individually at different times in my life, I have never been consistently good at any of them for any length of time. I make a good effort at doing as much as I can, and I certainly recognize the blessings that have come from those efforts, but I never felt like "good" was good enough.

The Savior admonished us to "Be ye therefore perfect...." (Matt. 5:48) There have been years when I can honestly say that I was perfect at paying an honest Tithe, but I don't see any other area in that list where I was anywhere near so perfect. And if I can't be perfect in these simple and easy areas, then how can I possibly hope to be perfect in the more difficult ones such as forgiving an offender or loving an enemy.

A large part of my imperfect living I can honestly attribute to lack of focus. A list that large is somewhat overwhelming and it seems like it would take getting up in the early, early hours of the morning and staying up to the late hours of the night just to accomplish it all. But, as busy as my days generally are, I realize that there are times throughout the day that I could work on being more perfect in these areas. But I don't think of these types of things during those moments and spend that time on far less fulfilling activities. It just wasn't on my radar. This is what drove me to develop my personal accountability spreadsheet in the first place and to, more recently, create PAS 2.0 (Personal Accountability Spreadsheet version 2.0).


The spreadsheet became a visual reminder of what my personal goals were each day and became a visual "yardstick" for measuring my level of perfection in those areas. If I engaged in personal scripture study for the day, I would highlight the box under the day's date for that category showing it as complete. Inside the box was a number "1" with the text colored the same as the highlighting color so you couldn't see it. At the bottom of the sheet, I plugged in a formula to add up the ones and give me a percentage of perfection for the day. Some of those goals would have a minimum time associated with it, such as 30+ minutes of Piano Practice. If I could only get in 15 minutes of practice, I would still highlight it and change the "1" to "0.5" so that I would still give myself credit for making the effort.

I made some improvements to the concept with PAS 2.0 to help me better identify the areas that I needed to focus more on. I added a perfection percentage to the right of each goal tracking area so that I could see each month how perfect I was in each individual category. I also added a summary tab that would summarize my performance for each goal each month and give me an overall percentage of perfection for the year. This also enables me to see how I have improved in each category throughout the year. I have added a little bit of psychology by using various colors for the different goals categories rather than one color for all of them. I know use blue (peace, tranquility, confidence) for my personal growth goals, red (love) for goals that involve my wife, yellow (joy, happiness, hope) for goals that involve the whole family, green (money, renewal, generosity) for my financial goals, and orange (balance) for my miscellaneous goals that include the enjoyment and development of my talents.

I know this is all a bit "nerdy", but it helps me become a little more perfect today than I was yesterday. One thing I have learned over the years is that sometimes things in life improve simply by the act of observing them. This is especially true of human beings. Think about how much more animated and energetic children are when they know someone is watching them. We have a subconscious drive to do our very best when we know someone is watching our performance.

I know that I have a little bit of a competitive streak and the one person I love to outdo more than anybody else is myself. PAS 2.0 provides the healthiest competitive environment I have ever experienced. If there are 22 tasks that I want to accomplish in a given day and I only manage to do 15, I am highly driven to become a little more perfect by scoring a 16 or 17 the next day. If I manage to have a "perfect" day, I work hard to see how many consecutive "perfect" days I can manage.

I know some of you are probably freaking out over the fact that I have 22 tasks that I want to accomplish each day. To be honest, there are actually 25 - some of them just happen to be once a week and others are only every couple of days. But out of those 25 tasks, some can be done in as little time as anywhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. They are small disciplines that I need to do more consistently in order to live a happier, more prosperous, more fulfilling life.

I have also included tasks in here that I don't necessarily want to get done 100% of the time. Goals such as daily scripture reading, prayer, exercise and others are definitely the ones I want to become 100% perfect every day. But some goals, particularly those that allow me to enjoy my talents more, I just want to do more often than I currently do. Those include playing the piano, writing creatively, posting on my blog and doing artwork. So, if I score a 91% for the day meaning I accomplished 20 out of 22 tasks because I didn't do any creative writing or work on any artwork, that is still a perfect day for me. I did those tasks that were most important and I exercised and developed some of the talents that add to my joy and fulfillment. To me, that is perfection.

If you haven't already, I encourage all those who happen to read this to identify areas in your life that you would like to become a little more perfect in and develop a plan and tools for measuring your progress. If you are willing to embrace your inner nerd and want a copy of PAS 2.0 for your own personal use, feel free to e-mail me and I will send you a copy.