The second of my ten personal values is honesty. That means being honest with myself as well as with other people, and being as transparent as I can be without hurting others. Honesty is one of those things that’s intrinsically good. Just like dishonestly is evil and the blurry middleground plain sucks for everyone.

Measurement and Analysis

How can you track honesty? What does honesty mean?

I’ve had a good look and there are not many apps tied in to honesty. Does that mean honesty isn’t good for business!? Any app I did find was aimed at giving honest, but anonymous, feedback. I need my honesty to relate to me.

To me, honesty needs to correlate to something. It’s not like Liar, Liar where I’m going to answer everything I’m asked truthfully. No, honesty has a filter on it so people aren’t hurt or put in danger.

Honesty must be useful too I need to be honest in way that makes sense and helps both you and me (and whoever). With those qualifiers in mind, honesty for me means:

• Answering incoming questions honestly (or being honest about not being able to answer them)
• Sharing my successes and failures related to my goals

Honesty Reporting

The only way I can think to report on honesty is by sharing and transparency.
Enforced sharing means committing to writing a report at the end of every month that assesses how I have performed against my values and goals.

Transparency is about sharing the little things that happen in-between reports. I love the way one of my favourite companies, Buffer, sets default to transparency as a core value . That means that you need to have a reason not to share something otherwise, it goes public.

I’m not going to broadcast everything I do (that wouldn’t pass the usefulness test), but where I use an app or website, I’ll set it as public as I can.

With all that in mind, I can distil honesty down into four points:

• Share by default
• Set public goals and value
• Report on these goals and values in public
• Try to always answer honestly

In the months ahead, I’ll build more reporting into my blogging schedule and report back on how I’m getting on.

How do you stay honest?

Today’s featured image is ‘Double Talk’ by Mister G.C.