On keen observation, it occured to me that everything needs a point of reference or an established baseline.
Whether it is an athlete who wants to run 1 second faster in the 100m sprint or a regression suite that tells you how the system is expected to perform and how it performs after your code was introduced (have a strong test suite, you definitely don’t want to ship bugs : ))
Back to the point, unless and until you have this point of reference, nothing you do will make any sense, isn’t it ?
I did X yesterday, and Y today. That’s great, but how do you quantify or measure ?
Consider the software context, setting up points of reference is fairly easy in the start, perhaps you will say the load time of this page should always be < 2 seconds. But as the system grows and it becomes more complex, it’s not just you anymore, there are 100 others who are working on the same thing. Enforcement is a challenge, more like you can take a horse to the water, but can’t get it to drink the water ☹.
The next aspect of this is discipline, I strongly believe these go hand in hand. So in our software example, having a strong set of processes that enforce this behavior, without any escape, will surely ensure you stick to or do much better than the established standards.
Coming back to the athlete, it’s similar, you run in X seconds, you need to get to Y, where X > Y. Discipline is key — diet, sleep, physical and mental wellbeing.
End of the day, we all want a positive delta, a negative delta implies something isn’t right. It’s extremely important to be able to identify this don’t you think ?
In conclusion — Establish a baseline, be disciplined and you’ll become better than yesterday!