The model behind Plan Do Check and Adjust
Four questions a night.
The reasons we picked those four.
PDCAtracker looks small on purpose. Three to five minutes, four prompts, then you close the laptop. The reason it works at that size is the system underneath. This page lays out that system.
01 · PDCA
Plan. Do. Check. Adjust.
PDCA is a feedback loop from Walter Shewhart, popularized by W. Edwards Deming in the 1950s. Factories used it to lift quality without lifting cost. The idea is older than that, but the four-word version is what stuck: you Plan something, you Do it, you Check what actually happened, you Adjust for next time.
Before you chalk it up as a “productivity hack”, recognize it for what it is: The shape of every honest improvement loop. Pilots, Surgeons, Coaches… they all use it, because it WORKS. Most adults run a worse version of it and call it “trying to do better.” The four questions in PDCAtracker are that loop, logged and tracked daily, so it's harder to skip a step.
02 · Why nightly
Weekly is possible, but you get fewer data points. One might argue that may be too meager.
Reviews you do once a week are more likely to miss the moment. You forget what got in the way on Tuesday, because by Sunday you will have forgotten the details about Tuesday. And if you think you can do it once a month... those reviews are mostly fiction. The real data has decayed by then, and the story has had time to set.
Nightly is the smallest cadence that still catches the truth, because the day is still in your mind, and therefore your pen. You remember the call that you avoided, the workout you skipped, the thing you said you would adjust last night and did not. If you so choose, three to five minutes a night is enough to keep that information from slipping away.
03 · The four questions
Nothing fancy. Each one does different work.
Plan
Did what I planned happen?
Yes or No. You wrote the plan last night. Today either matched it, or it did not. The plan was the standard you had set for yourself, so this question is the scoreboard, and not the story.
Do
Did I have a sense of urgency with each of my appointments?
Urgency isn't about whether you showed up. It's measuring whether you didn't waste time, kept on message. It tracks if you honored the amount of time that you said that you were going to spend on the task. If you keep going over, that is a LEAK.
Check
Did I manage my time, so that all Urgent and Important things happened?
Urgent and Important... that's the top-left of the Eisenhower matrix. The stuff that actually moves your life forward. If it happened, what made the space for it? If it didn't... what did you allow to take the slot? Only when you track it can you start to see the patterns.
Adjust
What did I learn, and if needed, what do I need to adjust?
This is where the loop closes. What did today teach you? And based on that... what needs to change for tomorrow? Whatever you write here becomes tomorrow's Plan. That's the only way to stop living the same day on repeat.
04 · Standards Over Moods
The loop is how. The standard is why.
PDCA gives you the how. It's the system that keeps showing you the gap between what you said you'd do and what you actually did. Realize that the system doesn't pick the gap for you. You pick the gap. That's your Standard... who you decided to be, even on the days where everything in you says “not today.”
That's the core of Standards Over Moods, the book PDCAtracker is built around. Look at it this way: If Moods are weather, and Standards are climate... most plans fall apart because they're anchored to the weather. These four nightly questions keep you honest with “the climate.” Make a decision to skip the mood, and instead hit the standards. And when you stay with it for a year... you won't recognize the person who first opened the app.
More on the book at standardsovermoods.com.
A few minutes a night.
For the rest of your life.
That is the offer. If it sounds small, that is the point.
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