A year back, I realized that there were days where I would be very distracted and all over the place with my work. There were days where even though I worked ‘hard’ I wasn’t sure the right intentions drove me and there were days that pleased me so much I would be smiling when I finished my workday. I would sometimes even punch the air. It’s almost my body and subconscious know the right thing I should be doing. It has its unsaid metrics, which may not be what’s on your company goals sheet.

Ever since then, I started tracking it. Personally, it’s probably my most accurate north star metric.

I have a simple entry in my notes app on my phone that contains the number of times I have made myself smile with my work. It doesn’t matter what other metrics were achieved or not; it doesn’t matter if the task was a small or big feat. If I am smiling by the end of it, I give myself a point and add it to the total. It need not always be 1 point. 

I remember when I lost 5 of the blog posts I had written because my phone stopped working, and I had not saved it to the cloud. I was so depressed, and I couldn’t write for a couple of days. Then when I finally picked myself up and re-wrote just 1 of those articles, it was such a big feat given the circumstances that I gave myself a broad 5 smiles. Each blog post typically earns one smile because I knew how crucial that I overcame the disappointment was and how important it was to keep the habit going. I am smiling right now because I still am proud of it, and it always makes me happy.

The author is the founder of Proxies API, a proxy rotation api service.