After a busy week, a common question that comes up at the family dinner table: How has your day been? How was your week?

And that set me thinking — dangerous I know.

How does one define how the past week has been? And more importantly, how do you measure any progress, one is making? After all, its not just how the week’s been but also how can you improve what is coming up.

To quote Lord Kelvin^[1]:

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”

And in the same vein, I’ve come-up with four parameters that we use in our family to define general well-being and happiness of each family members and the family as a whole. And devised an amazingly simple meter to measure the parameters.

In keeping with the KISS^[2] principle, the four simple parameters are:

• Health: How has your health been this week? Did you exercise, did you lose/gain weight, any new symptoms appearing.
• Work: did you enjoy what you did at work? Got praised, was shouted at, got a bonus, was stressed.
• Finance: Earned a bit extra, some unexpected expense has landed etc. 
• Family time: Did you and your family had a laugh, enjoyed each-others company, or had an argument, was there tension in the air.

And to measure all the parameters, a very simple meter:

And to measure how the day/week’s been, one simply ranks the happiness index on the scale of -5 to 0 to +5. 

–          0 indicating nothing to write home about. 

–          -ve scale indicating that its not trending in the direction that you’d like and 

–          +ve scale is where you are happy with.

For e.g if you got a bonus, the finance index would jump to +3 (say). Similarly, daughter/son getting the exam results and admission would drive the family index to +5. Likewise, in the opposite scale, a weekend binge drinking might drive the health index in negative. 

And in simple terms one tracks the results to generate the trend … which of course means a smart app of some sort … but that is some homework for some other day. 

Welcome thoughts/comments. 

Ps. Some have suggested the health-0-meter to have scale of -3 to 0 to +3. That works as well.

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