Latest Blog Post

Read Online 

Spent the last week recovering from the most insane September and October that I've had in many years, if not ever, and trying to get a little bit of space back into my life, and a little bit of health or rest or recovery.

It was hampered by the fact that I developed the symptoms of shingles in my right leg, which is only the second time in my life I've ever had such symptoms, but it's a demonstration of how hard I was running, even though in the middle of it I don't quite see it.

As of a few months ago, I moved on to the Garmin Fenix 8 watch, which obviously analyses all of this and tells me the story, and I look at the data every day and I'm interested in it, but I don't really have any insight into how accurate it is or how much I'm affected.

One of the pieces of data that the Garmin Fenix gives you is the ‘training readiness score’.

This is a score out of 100 based on a collection of some of your metrics to show you how ready you might be to do some training today.

Through September and October, I've trained  4 or 5 times a week, at the very least, but a lot of the time my training readiness score has been 1 out of 100!

So all the way through, the metrics were telling me to stop, but my psychology was telling me not to.

Truth is, I don't trust it, not yet, and that's because I don't have the insight into how to apply these metrics to my own life.

I definitely will have, and I'm moving towards that, because it tells me all the time that my sleep score is below average, but in fact my sleep score is totally fine, and most of the time the amount of sleep I get and the quality of my sleep I know is pretty good.

And so what's the point of this?

It's not the data; it's the insight into the data.

If you had told me 10 years ago that I would wake up every morning at 6:30 and have a coffee and look at this type of data related to my own health, I'd tell you they were dreaming.

But yesterday at work, the genius at our place that is Tom Reason, just offhand showed me the Claude dashboard for marketing that he's developed over the past little while. 

We now have a high-speed data marketing dashboard that updates, well, whenever we want, and that is connected to all the right aspects of the software within our business to collect the analytics that we want, but also to produce marketing at the drop of a hat.

As an example, the marketing dashboard is linked to Canva, and so for production of bespoke marketing material which can then be published, we can travel at almost the speed of light.

The change in this has been staggering because for the past year at our business we've been trying to refine a Power BI dashboard based around the Microsoft platform.

I think this is already out of date because we could effectively export the Power BI dashboard now and create a cloud dashboard, and then we can plug that into where it needs to plug in, and we can update it instantly, and now we have the data at the speed of light.

But all the old principles and all the old problems remain the same, and we are absolutely still subject to ‘paralysis by analysis’.

Insight, insight, insight.

When I was a basketball player in the olden days, the best coach I ever had told me the most important thing in basketball was shooting.

After that, you would practise shooting, and when your fingers were bleeding and you were exhausted, you would practise shooting some more.

Insight, insight, insight.

All the data in the world won't help you if you can't understand how to read it.

Blog Post Number - 4715