Effectivity

The Power of Averaging

Today I am writing about Averaging - a very simple, but ignored, performance tool that works in many different situations.  Averaging, is a concept that occurs naturally sometimes when we form a goal or a plan, but at other times it is strangely missing.  Why is that?

When I use the word averaging, I mean performing to a standard that, given the plusses and minusses, still meets your goal expectation.  For example, say you have a simple goal of reading a chapter of a book every day.  This is your goal expectation:

• On day 1 you read one chapter
• On day 2 you have spare time so you read 2
• On day three you read 1 again
• On day 4 you are too busy to read any 

Is this success or failure?  On average, I believe it is success.  You have met your goal expectation.  The maths is simple:

                                      (1+2+1+0)/4 =1 

                                    The average number of pages read per day (over the four days) is 1.

This average concept works perfectly well in most situations, because our daily total only matters in so much as it contributes to our total total.  If we want to finish our book in 20 days, we will achieve this by either reading the 20 chapters at exactly 1 chapter per day, or by reading the chapters at an average of 1 per day.  In the big picture it makes no difference, we still meet our goal. 

Averaging works better than exact performance in the real world.  Ideally we could divide all of our goals up into equal bits and achieve each bit in equal time, but life isn’t really like that.  Some days are too short, some days there are complications.  Other days we are very productive, and still others we muster up extreme motivation.  On average, our performance is up to standard even if day to day we are not exactly performing as we would like.

The key benefit of averaging your daily (or even hourly) performance is that it can keep your motivation alive.  If you fail to perform on one occasion, there is no need to give up.  The next day you can take back the loss by achieving above the average, or you can eat it up over a number of future ocasions.  Another way of looking at it is that you can store up some performance from your early enthusiasm in the expectation that you may need to eat into it later in the process. 

Averaging is a simple concept, but the maths is sometimes difficult to come to grips with.  I have put together the 7 most important averaging concepts to help those who aren’t interested in working out the maths for themselves:

1. An average is simply the total result, at that stage, divided by the number of sessions that it has taken to make up that total.
2. This means that an average at any stage is dependent on that particular stage as well as all of the previous stages
3. Averages can easily be changed early in a series of stages.  Even one marginally high or low performance will change the average dramatically
4. Over time, averages become more sticky and stable.  If your goal is to walk around the block 5 times every day, doubling your daily performance on day 3 will make a massive difference to the average, doubling it on day 365 will make scarcely any difference to the average. 
5. Any average is subject to change.  If you are performing above average for even a moment, you are creating an upwards force on the average, if you are under performing for any time at all, you are contributing to lower the average.  The only time when an average is truly stable is when you are performing exactly at the average level.
6. The worst thing you can do to an average is record a zero value for any session.  To add zero to the total but still divide that total by an extra session is really going to let your average down.  It is better, from an averaging perspective to under perform, than to not perform.  Even if you walk slowly for 5 minutes of your marathon, it is still less harmful to your average than standing still for the 5 minutes.
7. It is usually a lot easier to maintain a high average than it is to regain it.  If your average drops for any reason, you will have to perform at a level above your average until it returns.  In most cases it is easier to continually perform near the average to save yourself the gut busting work.

One particularly obvious example of averaging is in a racing situation.  Last weekend I raced my bike in an enduro time trial event.  I went in there with the aim of riding a 40 km/hr average whenever I was on the track.  I found that after my first turn I was sitting on just under 39km/hr.  The next time I picked this up to just over 39 km/hr, but over the following 4 turns I couldn’t make the average budge no matter how hard I tried.  My performance over these last four turns was, if anything, slightly higher but not enough to make a difference after the cumulative number of laps.  It turns out that I wasn’t able to manage above 42km/hr for any given lap, so it would have taken a long, long time to raise my average to 40km/hr after establishing 39km/hr for so many laps.  Think about point #4 above.  If I had been working harder earlier, I would have put everything I had into establishing my 40km average at the start of the race and then spent the rest of the time just maintaining it as per point #7.  In the end, I missed my goal, by less than 1km/hr.

Of course averaging does not work in all situations.  There are times when you simply have to perform exactly as planned on each occasion.  However, when averaging is possible, it can be an excellent tool to absorb the effects that the real world has on our performance.  Averaging our performance keeps us motivated, allows us flexibility and still lets us get to our final objective on time.  So who said maths was boring?

Thanks

Tom