From ancient Egyptian cubits to fitness tracker apps, humankind has long been seeking ever more ways to measure the world – and ourselves. But what is this doing to us?Measures are both meaningful and arbitrary; iron guides in our lives that are malleable if we want them to be. If they don’t work – if they don’t measure up – then they too can be remade.

Everything Is Getting Measured

Around 6,000 years ago, the first standardised units were deployed in river valley civilisations such as ancient Egypt, where the cubit was defined by the length of the human arm, from elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and used to measure out the dimensions of the pyramids. In the Middle Ages, the task of regulating measurement to facilitate trade was both privilege and a burden for rulers: a means of exercising power over their subjects, and a trigger for unrest.

The Start Of Modern Measurements

<ul><li>The metric system was created to simplify metrology and embody political ideals.</li><li>Today, international standards like those mandated by NIST and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) are mostly invisible in our lives.</li><li>Where measurement does intrude is via bureaucracies of various stripes, particularly in education and the workplace</li><li>"Metric fixation" is a ubiquitous concept that pervades not only the private sector but also the less-quantifiable activities of the state, such as healthcare and policing</li></ul>

The Metric System

We live in the age of measured accountability, of reward for measured performance, and belief in the virtues of publicizing those metrics through 'transparency".Excessive measurement and inappropriate measurement will distort, distract, and destroy what we claim to value.

The Bottom Line

The long read: From ancient Egyptian cubits to fitness tracker apps, humankind has long been seeking ever more ways to measure the world – and ourselves. But what is this doing to us?

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Personal Development

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Business

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Society, Arts & Culture

Made to measure: why we can’t stop quantifying our lives

The envelope budgeting money management strategy forces you to accurately budget your expenses each month by only giving you access to a predetermined amount of money, and the goal is to teach you to gain better control of your finances.Though the envelope budgeting method might not be suitable for everybody since it requires only the use of cash, it is still a great exercise to help you form a disciplined budgeting habit. So how does the envelope system work, and is it the right choice for you? Here is what you need to know.

Intro: Restart Your Saving Habit

The envelope system is a <a href="https://mint.intuit.com/blog/budgeting/money-saving-challenge/">money management technique</a> that helps track exactly how much money you have in each budget category for the month by keeping your cash tucked away in physical envelopes. Once you’ve decided how much to budget for each category, you are only allowed to spend the amount of cash available in each envelope. Once you run out of cash, you can’t spend money in that category until the following month.

Defining The Envelope 

1. Create Categories and a BudgetCreate clear categories so that you know exactly where your money is going and how much is being spent.2. Label the EnvelopesAfter deciding which categories to include in your spending budget, you’ll next write the names of the category and the budget amount on each envelope.3. Allocate Funds to Each EnvelopePlace the allocated funds according to your established budget into each envelope.4. Spend WiselyWhen it’s time to go grocery shopping or pay your bills, take funds from the appropriate category or simply carry the envelope with you on the trip.

Start Using the Envelope Budgeting System

Even if you already have a healthy emergency fund, a budget tracker or worksheet will allow you to track how much money you’re earning, investing, and spending each month. Unlike the envelope method, you aren’t restricted to only spending with cash, which allows much more flexibility. Though manually tracking your expenses can take up some time, it’ll also force you to think about potential ways to cut down on your spending and improve your money habits.

Use A Monthly budget Tracker

Looking for a new way to save money? Consider envelope budgeting to help divide your income into different categories and manage spending.

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Career

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Money & Investments

How to Use Envelope Budgeting to Increase Your Savings

When new customers begin using your product, they are not completely convinced until they start realising the value from it. Onboarding is not just about getting your customer familiar with the product.
It is also about hand-holding the customer in the initial usage which fits right in their context. They need to start finding value from the product to make sure that their ROI is soon and easily recovered. Hence, onboarding metrics help you gauge if your customers can attain those results or not.

Onboarding Metrics

Using the customer onboarding metrics is crucial because only through this you can measure the efficiency of your onboarding process and identify the areas that need improvements. Onboarding is the most usage-sensitive time for your customer because only during this phase, most of the customers decide whether to continue with the product or not. If onboarding fails, there is no way you can expect your customer to continue their subscription for the next renewal cycle.

Importance Of Onboarding Metrics

First time value is the point during the onboarding phase when the customer realises the value of your product in their business context. And Time to first time value is the time taken for them to reach that result. Now, when you are setting up your product in their technical environment you may have to do the following: <ul><li>Make the technical configuration of the product according to the customer’s business needs</li><li>Integration with other software they use to collaborate seamlessly </li><li>Setup users, assign roles and give access rights.</li></ul>

Time to First-time Value

According to an industry-wide standard, a free trial to paid conversion rate of anything less than 25% is considered to be poor for this marketing strategy. It means, for example, out of 100 free trial users, if the number of customers who are deciding to purchase your product after their trial period is over is less than 25, then it means you need improvement in your product.  Users, out of their zeal of trying your product for free, self-educate themselves about the product. This saves a lot of time and effort that you need to give them to provide initial training.

Free Trial to Paid Conversion

When you are providing the training to the customer, you need to divide the whole training package into different modules. Then for each of these training modules, you must measure the time a customer takes to complete them.  You can either follow the tech-touch engagement with them where you send them online material to watch and learn by themselves. Or, you can follow a high-touch onboarding where you personally give them the orientation of the product.

Customer Progress

When customers start using the product, there are various points when they need your technical support to resolve their issues. Take regular surveys and feedback from the customers and log all the commonly raised queries in your customer success platform. Then measure the time you have taken to respond to each of them to resolve their issues. These metrics for the onboarding process are crucial to decide the efficiency of your service and customer success processes.

Customer Response Rate

Defining customer personas makes it useful for you to work with customers from different backgrounds. Your customers might be having a totally different mindset from the team that has built your product. They might start with using different features than what you expect.  By creating their personas, it would help you give them orientation of your product based on their skills and proficiency. For example, if a statistician is using your product, then your onboarding meeting with them would be different. And for a technical architect it would differ as well.

Customer Personas

There are many metrics to calculate the product adoption rate. Metrics like the Daily active users (DAU) calculate how many users are active on your platform on a daily basis. Likewise, MAU calculates the same on a monthly basis. The more engaged they are with your product the higher the adoption rate.As a customer success manager, your goal is to facilitate the early adoption of your product in the customer’s business environment.

Product Adoption Rate

Follow the same standards for all your new customers’ onboarding. This would make it easy for you to track the right metrics and introduce steps to optimise the process. If your efforts are inconsistent, then it will be difficult to know the areas of improvement.

Best Practises For Customer Onboarding: Standardise Your Process

Onboarding is not just about all the technical setup and getting your customer started on your product. It is also a phase when new relationships are built, sometimes even for a lifetime. Hence, keep your introductions with new team members remarkable and think of it as a start of a new relationship for the long-term.

Best Practises For Customer Onboarding: Keep A Human Touch

You might be following the high-touch or tech-touch engagement model for your new customers. No matter which model you choose, know that a new customer demands more of your attention in the initial times. You have to allocate more time than usual during the initial days. And as they grow old, you can resort to whatever engagement model that suits your bandwidth.

Best Practises For Customer Onboarding: Pay More Attention

The more accurately you can measure all the onboarding metrics, the better chances you have to improve the different areas. It is important to keep a granular view of your onboarding. Through that, you can fine-tune every aspect of it by measuring them individually. Once you have executed an impeccable onboarding process, within no time, you would have deployed all measures that are initially necessary towards long-term customer retention.

The Bottomline

Here are top SaaS onboarding stats you should look out to keep a check on a smoother user onboarding process.

What are the top user onboarding metrics? Here are top SaaS onboarding stats you should look out to keep a check on smoother user onboarding process.

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Economics

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Marketing & Sales

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Product & Design

Top 5 onboarding metrics to track customer onboarding

Retention measures how long your customer stays actively engaged with your product or business. The two key retention metrics are:<ul><li>Core retention: The total number of active users after a specific time period.</li><li>Proxy retention: These are action-based metrics. They are the core actions users need to take to support your model. It is not pure retention but an action that should lead to retention at some time.</li></ul>

Retention Can Make or Break a Business

A product-market fit gives you a sense of how ready your product is for the market. It's a measure of revenue against the payback period and shows the percentage of users who value your product over a period of time. When you have a product-market fit, you can:<ul><li>Scale your company</li><li>Spend money on growth</li><li>Be confident in your financial modelling</li><li>Be confident in your retention models.</li></ul>

Ensure to Have a Product-Market Fit

A cohort is a group of users who experience the product value at about the same time. <ul><li>Look at users for a month. The first month is Month Zero. All the users that experience the product in Month Zero is your cohort.</li><li>Track the behaviour of each key retention metric for that cohort of users.</li></ul>A PM can look at data per cohort to see what numbers improved over time. This can highlight the value within your product that attracts and keeps your users.

How to Develop Measurable Cohorts

The Activation Curve shows the number of users activated over a specific period of time. Many early-stage companies have bad retention at the start. They can get customers in but haven't figured out the mechanics to keep them around. When the metrics start to improve over time, you generally have the concept of product-market fit.

Building a Retention Chart

<ul><li>Have enough tooling to track signups on a cohort basis, such as Google Analytics, Google Analytics 360, Segment, Mixpanel, or Amplitude.</li><li>Know your proxy metric. What action is the user performing? (consuming content, a download, a daily active user?). Your proxy metric will be similar to your main goal metric, such as monthly active subscribers. </li></ul>

How to Built Retention Metrics

Focus on new users and the initial experiences they have with your product. To create a great first impression:<ul><li>Run experiments on user onboarding.</li><li>Personalise your sales process.</li><li>Incorporate feedback loops.</li></ul>Target better users. Look at the channels users come through (targeted and organic). Measure each channel to find your ideal customer. Kill features that don't provide enough core value. Use Firebase experiments to see how a rollout or a build is impacting retention metrics. Change your model or your pricing.

Four Key Factors that Impact Retention

This article looks at the core retention SaaS metrics you’ll need to monitor, along with how to measure and improve those metrics.

Retention Metrics That Matter

“I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.”

The Feynman Technique is a four-step process for understanding any topic:<ol><li>Choose a concept to learn. Select a topic you’re interested in learning about and write it at the top of a blank page in a notebook.</li><li>Teach it to yourself or someone else. Write everything you know about a topic out as if you were explaining it to yourself. Alternately, actually teach it to someone else.</li><li>Return to the source material if you get stuck. Go back to whatever you’re learning from – a book, lecture notes, podcast – and fill the gaps in your knowledge.</li><li>Simplify your explanations and create analogies. Streamline your notes and explanation, further clarifying the topic until it seems obvious. Additionally, think of analogies that feel intuitive.</li></ol>

What is the Feynman Technique?

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Use the Feynman Technique to learn anything. Borrow Nobel Prize winning Richard Feynman's tips and tricks for understanding complex concepts.

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Learning & Education

The Feynman Technique: How to Learn Anything Quickly

We tune into television series episode after episode because we've become invested in some or all of the character's lives. Marketers and psychologists measure this on the connectedness scale - the degree to which people think a series and its characters are real.
Even if the characters are rich and live in a 25 bedroom mansion while you live in a studio apartment, you can still connect to characters on a personal level and because you wish you lived a life like theirs.

Why we feel invested in a television series

Everyone loves to see wildly wealthy characters fail in a way because it shows their vulnerability.  Displaying the weaknesses of the characters serve to connect them to audiences. People can identify easier with characters who make mistakes.

Why we feel so captivated by the drama

On one end, we tend to think we can aspire to have some of the nice lifestyles portrayed in the shows - the clothes, the cars, the houses. But we also hate people who can afford and waste things and be so careless about it. Yet, it's just as easy for us to pretend to be something we're not when it comes to money. Even if we know we can't afford something, we can still use our credit card, even if we may struggle to pay it off, but we can certainly buy the item.

The love-hate relationship with rich characters

We often discount the positive of watching how the characters in a television series use and waste money. Money can be a taboo topic, but these forms of entertainment give us the opportunity to open up and discuss what we'd do in a similar situation.

Television shows open up taboo topics

(Paid Content) There&#8217;s the one percent and there&#8217;s the one percent of the one percent. This is a story about the latter. They only fly private, wouldn’t think twice about dropping $2,000 for a pizza covered in 24-karat gold, and put deposits on a casual chance at space travel.

Inside Our Fascination With The Filthy Rich

Fashion and trend forecasting is a process to predict the behaviour, buying habits and inclination of the consumer during a particular time of the year.
Apart from the age, geography, or income levels of the consumer, one has to look at the occasion, mood, beliefs, and fashion cycles and predict upcoming trends.
The calculation is done as follows: Season>Target Market>Consumer>Colors>Fabrics>Silhouette>Texture>Usage

Fashion Trend Forecasting

Six months before every season starts, the merchandising and design departments speculate on upcoming trends, collecting valuable data from professional agencies, taking into account the current season/weather conditions. 
They ensure colours are matching the seasons, with pastel colours for Spring, and earthy tones for the Fall season.

Fashion Trend Forecasting: Seasons

Companies in the fashion industry have cut-throat competition and are turning to market intelligence to survive, sometimes at the expense of their competitors. 
Conventional market research is no longer sufficient, and the real-time data provided by social media and online data research companies are sought after for decision making.

Fashion Trend Forecasting: Market Intelligence

"There's no fashion if nobody buys it."

Consumer feedback and suggestions are recorded by manufacturers to make the necessary tweaks to their product lineup.
Surveys are typically done by phone or customer feedback forms to find out about shopping habits, preferences, income and lifestyles.

Fashion Trend Forecasting: Consumer Research

The main purpose of the fashion and trend forecasting industry is to provide a desirable product that appeals to the customer's needs on time.
The fashion market only exists when a substantial number of customers buy the products.

The Need For Fashion Forecasting

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Fashion & Beauty

Understanding Fashion Trends: Fashion Trend Forecasting

<ul>
<li>Spend less money than you earn</li>
<li>Always plan for the future: you should always look forward beyond the current month</li>
<li>Make your money make more money: invest, start a business or invest in your education.</li>
</ul>

The Golden Rules of Personal Finance

How you manage, spend, and invest your money can have a profound impact on your life, yet very few schools teach these important skills. Learning financial savvy can take a while, but the basics are fairly simple and never change. Here's where to get started.

How to Start Managing Your Money, For Those Who Never Learned Growing Up

Over the past year, it has never been easier to find something new to watch on TV. Despite so much fresh content, there is a growing trend for people to rewatch old series.
Data backs up the anecdotal evidence that 2020 (during the pandemic) was the year of the rewatch. The most streamed programme in the US was the American version of The Office.

We prefer to rewatch our favorite series

Streaming services are competing over the rights to add classic TV shows to their libraries. NBCUniversal committed to paying $500 million for exclusive rights to stream The Office for five years. WarnerMedia picked up Friends for $425 million for five years. Netflix paid $500 million for a five-year lease of Seinfeld.
Similarly, in the audio world, there is a rise in the "rewatch podcast." Name a TV hit, and there is probably an accompanying podcast taking a trip down memory lane.

How classic series became hot properties

<ul>
<li>Part of the rewatching trend is that technology has caught up to our interests. You don't have to wait for TV reruns - they are waiting for you online.</li>
<li>Then there is familiarity. The things people watch are not experimental. People find new things stressful as they don't know if it will be enjoyable, but a rewatch is guaranteed to be a treat.</li>
<li>A 2013 research paper describes the restorative nature of repeats. By reducing the element of risk, a rewatch can give a restorative, zen-like power.</li>
</ul>

Reasons for the classic series trend

<ul>
<li>Comedies seem to be perfect rewatching material. Laughter lowers stress and releases positive hormones.</li>
<li>Sitcoms provide a static world, with characters that maintain a consistent personality regardless of the situations they find themselves in.</li>
<li>The Sopranos is one of the outliers. Its success as a rewatch stems from being considered the greatest TV series of all time. Another is the political soap The West Wing.</li>
</ul>

What makes for a good rewatch

With the amount of new shows to choose from reaching overwhelming levels, increasingly audiences are choosing to rewatch their favourite series instead. David Renshaw explores why.

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Psychology

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Health

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Movies & Shows

Is rewatching old TV good for the soul?

<ul>
<li>Blockchain is a digital archive or registry, which can be private or public. It relies on a digital network of computers, or ‘nodes’ to verify details of the information, such as the authenticity of a transaction in the case of cryptos.</li>
<li>Many of us have heard of cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin), which have exploded in value in the last ten years.</li>
<li>The underlying technology, blockchain, is the heart of crypto and many other new digital applications and ecosystems.</li>
<li>Weirdly enough, it is the same technology that powered torrent downloads in their heyday, about 18 years ago.</li>
</ul>

Blockchain: The Engine Of The New World

Blockchain technology is fundamentally bigger than crypto or even the internet as we know it.
It offers radical transparency, zero run-time and breakthrough tech innovations to revolutionize many areas of life such as finance, insurance, transportation, personal identification, healthcare etc.

Blockchain Isn’t Just Crypto

<ul>
<li>Steve Wozniak (of Apple fame) is using blockchain to power its new company which aims to increase energy efficiency.</li>
<li>Mining of coins, a process that produces cryptocurrency is also being handled by blockchain technology.</li>
<li>Many startups are finding myriad uses of this new technology, like handling secure banking transactions, distribution of energy, streaming and many other unique applications.</li>
</ul>

Blockchain: From Energy To Banking

<ul>
<li>Transparency: The blockchain tech is transparent, as shown in the way it handles cryptocurrencies. Each transaction has a unique identifier, which ensures easy tracking and supply chain integrity.</li>
<li>Speed: Transactions are implemented at lightning fast speeds, with reduced latency. This is a sharp contrast from slow bank transactions and central servers that are unreliable and cumbersome.</li>
<li>Cost-Effectiveness: Due to the entire technology being digital, blockchain makes validation, verification and data-security a cost-effective process.</li>
</ul>

Made to measure: why we can’t stop quantifying our lives

How to Use Envelope Budgeting to Increase Your Savings

Top 5 onboarding metrics to track customer onboarding

Retention Metrics That Matter

The Feynman Technique: How to Learn Anything Quickly

Valerie