I’m pretty big on keeping an eye on things.  I’ve got a dashboard set up for Industry Interactive that lets me keep an eye on how things are going over the past week, or in some cases, 30 days.  In the interests of privacy, I’m going to keep the scales of the charts private (each gridline might be one, or it might be one thousand… who knows?).  I thought I’d share some of the info that I’m watching:

At the top of the dashboard, I’ve got a countdown showing me how many days are left in the month.  It’s amazing how often this information surprises me; today I opened it up and realized that we’re half-way through August, and my billings are behind for where I’d like them to be.

I keep a running tally of how many billable hours I’ve put in each day of the month, and the total.  As you can see, I didn’t bill anything for the first week or so of August.  Normally, that’d be bad news, but I was on a bit of a vacation then (my sister was visiting, and I’d rather spend time with her and my nieces than bill hours).  This is probably the single most important metric I’m tracking right now, as billable hours translates into cash flow/survival.

The next section is what I call “Mailmanagr at a glance”.  I’m not completely satisfied with this section at the moment, as it focusses more on Mailmanagr growth, than on current revenues.  The first chart gives a bit of a “heartbeat” of conversions.  If this is trending upwards, it means I’ve got new sales happening daily (you can see that things have been flat for a few days).  The next chart reflects new account signups; most days there’s a few new users registering to try out Mailamangr.

The final chart shows mail volume flowing through the system.  This is probably the chart I’m least satisfied with because high-volume days will completely skew the chart, and make it difficult for me to see the “averages”.

I need these charts to be a better reminder of how much Mailmangr is making/how useful it is for people.  It would probably also be worthwhile grabbing the number of open tickets out of Zendesk to remind me that there are outstanding issues to address.

The newest addition to the dashboard measures the number of SVN commits I’ve made to Mailmanagr over the past two weeks.  This reminds me to keep moving forward, at a steady pace.  My goal with this chart is to have something every day, not just peaks of activity (as you see here).  It’s tough balancing it off with client work.

What do you keep your eye on?