Can data help our wellness? The bottom line is yes. Okay, that’s the end of the blog. I'm kidding, keep reading. I’m curious if what I share below resonates with you.
When I think about the immense pressure organizations have to collect, analyze, and effectively use data to drive their productivity, the first word that comes to mind is not wellness. Sometimes, it feels like we—and Google—are in a constant state of data collection. That can be exhausting, both collecting data and having data collected about us. Aside from Google knowing to send us ads on the umbrella we told our friend we needed (let’s put aside how creepy spot-on those ads are), is all this data adding up to anything? My observation as a data strategist is that people and organizations may be collecting too much data but may not be collecting data in a way that helps them make strides toward a specific goal. In the spirit of less is more, it can help to have a clear sense of a small number of data points that are easy to collect and can help inform next steps.
With all the ways data can help us make a better world, wellness comes to the forefront because when we are our most well selves, we can do the good work we were meant and gifted to do in the world. When we are unwell, it dulls our shine and can deprive the world of our magic. Wellness has become increasingly vital to companies to drive satisfaction, retention, and productivity. Both in and out of the workplace, mental and physical health have surfaced as some of the most pressing needs of our time. Given years of global upheaval, wellness has felt perhaps the most needed but maybe at times the most out of reach. As a result, many of us are on a constant journey toward holistic wellness.
When you think of your own wellness, how do you know you are well? In what ways are you well and in what ways do you feel unwell? Do those feel like binaries to you, or are things in your life on more of a spectrum of wellness? Are the areas where you feel well always areas where you feel well or do they move from well to less well to unwell and back again? If you run a team or organization, how do you know that your staff is well? What signals to you that staff members are unwell? Are there staff behaviors that contribute to and detract from the organization’s overall wellness? When I facilitate sessions on wellness, I like to start by helping people and organizations gain clarity on what wellness means and what areas of wellness are most critical to them.
With the wellness areas defined, people can then think through what their wellness goals are for each area, and then a trackable metric that can help measure progress towards that goal. Let’s take an example- sleep. Let’s say your goal is to get high quality, consistent sleep. What metric might be useful for you? You could track countless things related to sleep. But what will help drive your practices and behaviors toward this goal? Do you want to track how many nights you sleep eight hours (does anyone get eight hours these days)? Or how many nights you got into bed at a certain time? Or how many minutes before bed you stopped using screens? Or when time you feel asleep each night? Or the number of straight hours of sleep you got? Or how well rested you felt each morning? You could spend all day or night collecting all of these points. To start, what is one metric that feels most useful to track to support high quality, consistent sleep? Let’s say you choose number of hours of non-screen time before bed. Where do you want to track this information? In an app on your phone? Excel file? Whatever works for you but it needs to be something that is easy to use and doesn’t feel overwhelming. Or else you won’t track it.
Let’s say you are able to track your non-screen minutes prior to sleep for weeknights for a month. That is already huge progress. But then what? This goes back to my earlier point that often we track lots of data in our personal and professional lives and don’t do much with it. That is a lot of data collection work to go unused. So the hard part is analyzing the data in a way that helps us glean insights from the data. What is the data telling us about how we need to stop, start, or continue doing something? My rule of thumb is that the time for analysis and reflection should be at least as much as the time needed to collect the data. Tech platforms with built-in dashboard functions can make it so much easier to see our data. You needn’t be a data wiz to see your data in a digestible way. One of my recent favorites is conditional formatting my own wellness tracking sheet in Excel so I can easily see if I am on track toward my goal or heading in the opposite direction.
The analysis and reflection can help you to design or decide on a strategic direction moving forward. If you are noticing that your non-screen time before bed is constantly at zero minutes, then maybe your next step is to create one night a week where you do something non-screen related like crossword puzzles (those online NYT games don’t count as non-screen time) or looking through cookbooks to find your perfect next recipe to try. You decide that you will try doing a non-screen activity each Sunday night to kick-start the work week for you.
What is the final step? Actually carrying out this strategy. You can call it action, you can call it implementation. But you have to do the thing. Or try your best to do the thing. This is usually the hardest part. Because motivating ourselves to make real change in our behavior or actions is hard. It’s part of being human.
So that is one tiny example of how data can be used to help us get and stay well. This approach can be used for the biggest and smallest goals we have, in work and in life. If you have seen Monarch Consulting’s Client Services Brief, you know that this process aligns with our approach to helping organizations create and make progress toward their goals. We call it our impact framework. Is this similar to or different from the way you think about reaching goals? What is your approach? Let’s connect. Wishing you well on your journey towards wellness and all of your goals.