I’ve heard it said that what gets measured gets done. But the question remains, what exactly should we be measuring?

Maybe you want your company’s profits to grow by the end of the quarter. Or you want to increase your organization’s customer satisfaction scores by the end of the year. Or you want to make honor roll this semester. These types of goals are clearly measurable — profit, survey scores, grades — but focusing on these numbers alone isn’t sufficient to achieve them. The reason is these kinds of numbers are simply reflections of everything else that happened leading up to them.

In the book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, the authors highlight the difference between lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures are the results that usually get all the attention — profits, ratings, awards — but they are actually the result of all the other actions and decisions along the way. These kinds of measures come later — they “lag” our actions — and once you get them it’s too late to go back and change them. Lead measures, on the other hand, are the things you can measure today that will have a direct impact on longer-term outcomes.

For instance, if you’re a salesman, instead of focusing only on your monthly or quarterly sales numbers, you would focus in on specific actions you can track today, like the number of daily calls you make. The final sales number is important, but you can’t force people to buy from you. But you can control the number of calls you complete. And the more calls you make, the better the odds of hitting the longer-term goal of higher sales. So in this case the number of calls per day could be a good lead measure of whether you’re on track to reach your larger goal.

The key components to a good lead measure is it needs to be both something you can actually do and track, and it also needs to have a strong correlation with the longer-term goal you’re looking to hit. If you’re a student, and you want to get an A in a class, there are countless things you could track, but there may be only a handful of things that are strongly correlated with your final grade. Tracking your caloric intake would be irrelevant in this context, but tracking hours of daily study would not.

Once you know what your longer term objective is, the challenge is to choose the proper lead measures to keep an eye on. Sometimes they’ll be obvious, and sometimes they may not. But by taking time to carefully choose what these lead measures are in your context, you’ll have a much greater chance of hitting your long-term objective.

Instead of drifting along and hoping for the best, focusing on lead measures can provide you with a good sense of how things are trending — are you doing enough now to get where you want to go, or do you need to pick up the pace?

Having this kind of information can bring the motivation to keep doing the little things that need to be done day-to-day. And it’s these little things done day in and day out that ultimately add up to the long-term results we one day experience.