Counting change

So after you have become the change you want to see in the world, after you have gotten things moving and after you have begun your "impact", till when do you continue what you started? How do you know if doing something differently can create more "impact"? Where do you improvise and course-correct?

That can be tricky. Establishing a sound model for measuring change might not be the simplest task but delving straight into execution without one in place is only an effort well-wasted. The key to making an effort count for is to make its results countable. It holds true for almost anything that you might want to change. They now have scale-o-meters even for fairness creams and whitening toothpastes!

Here's my 2-step guide to making your own change-counting model,

• Make a metric system – Define numeric parameters that will indicate progress or not. For instance, a tutor uses the reading speed of the kids in her classroom as a parameter to measure her impact. A good metric system gives the advantage of setting quantifiable goals – when has ‘must reach X number in Y time’ not helped?

• Don’t forget a peer comparator – Always make room for measuring how peers are faring w.r.t. the parameters in the metric system. States of more, less and equal impact are all useful indicators. For instance, if a kid in a tutor’s classroom has the same improvement in reading speed as any other kid of the same age, then where’s the impact? 

Shake 'n' Go

Mechanically powered devices are a godsend in times of distress. I realized it recently when a crank flashlight guided me through an 8-hour power cut, till long after my cell phone battery had died on me. Every time the device discharges, all you need to do is crank it and with some physics inside, its battery charges up right back. I also came across wrist watches designed to get charged from the wearer's arm movement.  I wondered how brilliant would it be to have a cell phone that I could just crank and recharge! No need to carry a charger, no more disrupted conversation, no more 'Oops! a dead battery in the middle-of-nowhere.' Extra topping: when on vibrating alert, the cell phone will recover some energy from its own movement. Quite neat I thought to myself. But as usual, I was not the first one to think of it. The Internet returned a gazillion results for 'mechanically powered cell phones'. Check out some sleek solutions here. My favorite amongst these is the iYo charger.

And it doesn't stop here. They are also building talk powered cell phones - yes, these would recharge as you speak into them. Waiting to get my hands on one of those!