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Discipline #3
: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
“People play differently when they’re keeping score,” the 4DX authors explain. They
then elaborate that when attempting to drive your team’s engagement toward your
organization’s wildly important goal, it’s important that they have a public place to
record and track their lead measures. This scoreboard creates a sense of competition
that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their
attention. It also provides a reinforcing source of motivation. Once the team notices
their success with a lead measure, they become invested in perpetuating this
performance.
In the preceding discipline, I argued that for an individual focused on deep work,
hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the
individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays
the individual’s current deep work hour count.
In my early experiments with 4DX, I settled on a simple but effective solution for
implementing this scoreboard. I took a piece of card stock and divided it into rows,
one for each week of the current semester. I then labeled each row with the dates of
the week and taped it to the wall next to my computer monitor (where it couldn’t be
ignored). As each week progressed, I kept track of the hours spent in deep work that
week with a simple tally of tick marks in that week’s row. To maximize the motivation
generated by this scoreboard, whenever I reached an important milestone in an
academic paper (e.g., solving a key proof), I would circle the tally mark
corresponding to the hour where I finished the result.
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This served two purposes.
First, it allowed me to connect, at a visceral level, accumulated deep work hours and

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tangible results. Second, it helped calibrate my expectations for how many hours of
deep work were needed per result. This reality (which was larger than I first
assumed) helped spur me to squeeze more such hours into each week.