What is one thing I can do to make this better?

Take any piece of work that you are about to submit:

1. could be a spreadsheet/doc you are about to share with your team
2. could be a feature you are coding out
3. could even be a response to a question your CEO asked you

Right before you share it, pause and ask yourself: What is one thing I can do to make this better?

Then implement your idea and make it better. Repeat.

Round 1

For example, let's say you have a spreadsheet containing some data that you are about to present to your boss - to make a case for why we should prioritize a certain project.

You thought you were ready to share the link with your boss, but you remember this article and think to yourself "what is one thing i can do to make this better?"

After 1 mins of racking your brain, you come to realize the overall layout and formatting could be better.

So you improve things by:

1. Removing all typos
2. Putting cell borders at appropriate places
3. Aligning contents correctly
4. Adding Rs (₹) symbols for when you talk about money
5. Standardizing the number of decimal places across the spreadsheet
6. You use dropdowns and conditional statements wherever applicable.

Having done the above, you are happy with how nice your spreadsheet looks.

Round 2

But you decide to see how far you can take the question of "what is one thing i can do to make this better?"

After 2 mins of racking your brain, you realize it would be nicer if there was a new tab in the spreadsheet that explains "How to interpret the data in this spreadsheet correctly?"

So you get to it by:

• adding a legend to explain abbreviations you've used
• Add a small write up and an accompanying loom recording of you walking through the data and making some example interpretations of certain rows of the dataset.

You are now happy with how it looks. And its easy for a new person coming across this spreadsheet for the first time to orient themselves. But you decide to do another round.

Round 3

Naming the spreadsheet well would make it better. The original name for this spreadsheet was "food order volume data". Terrible name.

You change it to "South Bangalore Online Food Ordering Volume 29th Jan 2022 - 29th Jan 2023 | Project Alpha"

Descriptive file names make it easier for you or others to look up these files later on. For example in this case, as long as I look up "project alpha", this particular spreadsheet from above will show up in my search results.

Round 4

You realize you could add a "simulator" to help them change variables and therefore play around with the data. If they can play around with the data, they'll understand it better.

Plus you set the defaults in the simulator such that it paints an exciting picture for the viewer for what things would look like if your project accomplished its stated outcomes.

Conclusion

Having done 4 rounds of asking yourself "What is one thing I can do to make this better?" takes you to a good place in terms of the quality of your output.

Even with this post you are reading, I'd asked myself what is one thing I could do to improve it. The initial version did not have a detailed 4 round sample scenario that I came up with to make my point. Which I eventually did end up adding.

And then I thought more about how else I could make it better. Well I could add screenshots from a spreadsheet where I'm actually making the edits that i'm describing in this post. Being able to see images of the spreadsheet improving every subsequent round would make for a better post.

Having said that, something I tend to do when I have a decent idea for an improvement which I don't plan to implement is I'll mention something like "This could be made better if I also did x, y and z however sharing it as is since the extra hour to do it may not be worth it"

The useful thing about doing this exercise is that you permanently end up improving your skillsets. By this, I mean that, the next time you sit down to create a spreadsheet containing data, you'd keep all of the above points (creating a simulator, formatting it well, etc) from the get go. So by default you'd come up with a higher quality spreadsheet.

And this applies to pretty much anything that you do. If you consciously or subconsciously do this exercise when it comes to the thousands of "submissions" you make in a year, you keep increasing your own baseline quality.