Happiness Metric Applied to Me?

It’s a great practice for Agile teams to keep a happiness metric to help teams improve their teamwork to create outcomes. Dips in happiness can be a sign that something is amiss in the team, and usually shows up before velocity and product quality starts to trend downward.

But does the same idea work for an individual? I think the answer is yes! Here’s my data from mid-February to mid-May 2019.

To help me calibrate this measure, I used a -3 to +3 scale. This provide a true midpoint (0), so it’s more clear on what’s happy or unhappy. I recorded this measure each day. The red dotted line is the moving average of the previous few days.

Agile Best Self Principle #7: Investing the time in yourself is the primary measure of progress.

In the previous months when I turned up the effort to learn about best self, create and deliver a Scrum course to my community education class, and build on a streak of consecutive days of mindfulness training (now 132 days).

Agile Best Self Principle #6: The most effective way to be your best self is to be mindful and intentional.

As a data guy to the core, seeing this data visualized really provided powerful insight. When I spend more effort living my vision, the happier I am overall. Sure, there are still bad days — life does happen. I think the time spent unhappy is also reduced. Nevertheless, the trend is positive. It is possible to “turn up the good!”

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