The end of one era always signals the beginning of another. The high times of the housing boom gave way to the struggle-to-survive of the Great Recession. Some days it seems as if 2008 is long behind us and some days it seems like it just won't go away. So here we are at the halfway point for 2014 and although the market has been showing signs of regaining its footing for quite a while, some analysts say "we've completely stagnated" and others are being so bold to say "we're slipping backward." What does it feel like for you? Do you feel like we're in a state of relative normalcy?

Now is as good a time as any to take an assessment and set some direction towards the end of 2014. As we enter into summer when it's almost an obligatory trend towards leisure, wouldn't it be nice to do so knowing that unlike the economy, which no one can predict, you could make a prediction about where you finish 2014 and how you want to start 2015? Unlike the economy, we can set periodic times to do analysis and change our course direction. I guess I started thinking about this over the long Memorial weekend where I had a new GPS system to play with on our sailboat. While this was a leisurely sail with little need to chart specific directions, it was still nice to be able to plan and execute the plan. It was especially nice with a rum drink in hand, which with long hours at the helm, gave me time to give thought to the fact that we're halfway through 2014 and the winds of the economy have certainly been light.

I'm glad that there are set periodic time frames in our business world that help keep us on track. When you operate on a calendar year or fiscal year, quarterly budgets and half year checkpoints do a good job when performing overall planning. But just like my GPS, analytics that cover months at a time aren't nearly as good as those that happen each and every day, each and every hour and in some cases each and every quarter hour. If in fact this weekend had been a race, there's no way I could've been as lax about my measuring and plotting and had any chance.

I love to measure things and I've spent most of my business career on a constant journey of trying to make things more efficient, either to get increased output and profitability or to be able to have more free time. And I know that I am not alone in that quest. I know that you also have desire for either more money or more free time or both. The best way to get there is to be good with measuring. And that doesn't mean calculating a lot of stuff. It does mean measuring the right things over long periods of time. If you know where you've been and what you've done, you can have a better prediction of where you're going and what you will do. The first six months of this year will give you great insight as to what the second six months will hold and if you've done a good job of measuring along the way, you'll have years of data by now to make even better predictions.

So how about it? Have you done a good job so far so that you can, like we did this weekend, relax a little while keeping your eye on the finish line knowing that you'll hit your mark? If not, this might be a good point to take an assessment. Find those things that are most important for you to measure and get started. By this time next year you'll be really happy you did!