Meeting Your Goals #3: Tracking and Measuring Your Progress

This is the third part in a series on “meeting your goals”. The previous parts are Meeting Your Goals #1: Getting Focused, and Meeting Your Goals #2: Making a Commitment.

You’re focusing on a few key goals – and you’re fully committed to them. You’re well on the way to succeeding, but there’s one crucial thing that can help: tracking and measuring your progress. Whatever your goal – getting out of debt, losing weight, starting your small business, writing a novel – you’ll get there faster by tracking and/or measuring how you’re doing.

I’m distinguishing between “tracking” and “measuring” because they don’t mean quite the same thing, though you might have an overlap between them in practice.

Tracking means keeping a record of what you’ve done. It’s about your actions. For example, if your goal is to “run a marathon next year”, tracking might mean that you mark your calendar with a tick on each day you exercise.

Measuring means knowing how far you’ve progressed. It’s about your results. With the “run a marathon next year” goal, measuring might mean timing yourself on each run and recording the results.

So why bother? Why spend time and effort in writing down what you’ve done or what level you’ve reached? After all, it’s action that takes you towards your goals, right?

Ali’s Excuses Not to Track Your Goals

I’m going to go through a couple of my favourite excuses not to bother tracking and measuring your progress … and I’ll explain how I’ve overcome these.

“It’s a waste of time.”

This excuse always sounds good. We know how easy it is to waste time procrastinating. Have you ever spent a couple of hours drawing up the perfect plan for your week … only to see it fall to pieces by Monday lunchtime?

Tracking and measuring can seem like an unnecessary and time-consuming chore. If you’re aiming to lose weight, you might weigh yourself once a week, but keeping a food diary seems like too much effort. I’ve been there.

What I’ve learnt, though, is that the time invested in tracking and measuring your progress is repaid. By spending a few minutes each day jotting down what I’ve achieved – or ticking a box on a chart – I gain motivation and self-discipline.

If your excuse is not having much time, find a way to spend just five minutes a day tracking your key goals. Do it while you eat lunch, or while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil.

“I can’t measure my goals”

Some of my goals aren’t necessarily easy to measure. Goals like “being more patient” or “not getting worked up about the small stuff” aren’t as quantifiable as goals like “finish the first draft of my novel”. You can’t measure patience using a word count feature.

The problem here is that the “unmeasurable” goals are often the ones we really struggle to achieve. Because we can’t see what progress we’ve made, we end up feeling that we’re going nowhere.

The solution is to find some way to track or measure. One which works for me is writing down a list of how that particular area or goal was “better” each day. With a goal like patience, that list could include things like “I didn’t get angry when I had to wait for my friend” or “I sent out my short story and was prepared to wait several months for a response”.

Paying attention to the progress you’re making (or not making…) helps you in a number of ways.

Why Tracking and Measuring Helps You Succeed

When you’re heading towards a big, distant goal, it’s all too easy to get discouraged. Think of it like going on a long walk. If you have no idea how much further you have to go, or how far you’ve come, you’re likely to feel discouraged – even despairing – as soon as you start to get tired. But if you know you’ve already travelled five miles and have four more to go, you’ll feel encouraged: you’re over  half way.

Knowing where you’ve got to often provides additional motivation, and it can even become part of a challenge against yourself or against a friend:

Almost always, it becomes more fun to work towards a difficult goal if you have some sort of method of comparing your progress to the progress of others, or comparing your current state with your state in the past. You can see the improvement clearly – when you look and see that your net worth is up $10,000 compared to last year or you see your average mile is more than a minute faster than it was a couple months ago, it feels enormous. It’s a giant rush.

(Trent Hamm, Rule #7: Watch Your Progress – But Make It Fun)

If you have yet to make any serious attempt to track and measure your progress towards a goal, give it a try, and see how it works for you. Every single time I’ve successfully lost weight, it’s been in conjunction with tracking what I ate using a food diary and calorie-counting.

Measuring, in particular, helps you to make quick corrections if you end up stalling or backsliding. I’ve found this useful for financial goals: checking your bank balance frequently means it’s easy to cut your spending a bit – and it allows you to take fast action in the case of an unexpected problem.

Ways of Tracking and Measuring Your Progress

I’ve used various tools and methods over the years for tracking or measuring progress. These are a few that have worked for me.

Journaling

This is ideal for goals where progress isn’t straightforward and linear. Journaling lets you work through feelings and ideas, and can help you to figure out where you are in relation to a particular goal. Three techniques that work well here are:

• Writing a simple list of actions you’ve taken during the day – a bit like a to-do list, but after the event. This can help encourage you to stay focused and take action each day.
• Writing down a list of things that went well, or things that you did better at, each day. This is a great way to concentrate on the areas where you’re growing.
• Writing a list of major achievements each week or month, with your goals in mind: a good way to see if you’re neglecting any goals. I call this an “achievements book”.

Your journal can be handwritten or on your computer. You could even put it online as a blog – especially if you find that doing so helps you to stay accountable to your supporters!

Tick-Sheet

A tick-sheet is when you simply put a tick (or other mark) on each day that you make your desired progress towards a goal. For example, if your goal is to exercise regularly, you might tick each day that you manage to be active for at least thirty minutes. If you’re writing a novel, you could tick every day that you achieve at least 500 words.

Tick-sheets work for goals that involve the same action each day or several times a week. These goals might be more like daily tasks, and they’re often cases where tracking (the actions you take) is essentially the same as measuring (the progress you make).

Your tick-sheet might be:

• The calendar hanging on your wall
• Your diary
• The back of a notebook
• A spreadsheet on your computer
• A specialised program (online or offline)

One straightforward little program for this is Joe’s Goals. I started using it a few years back, but never really got going with it. I’m now giving it another try for tracking some of my “daily” goals, including:

• Being active (walking, cycling etc) for an hour or more
• Having a quiet, reflective time of Bible reading and prayer
• Getting to bed by 10.30pm
• Writing in my journal
• Reading and writing notes on a section of the book I’m currently working through (Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles – Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk)

These are all small goals – I think of them as simply part of a good daily routine – and my two “big” goals (my novel and this blog) are ones that I’m tracking and measuring in different ways.

Getting Started With Tracking and Measuring

Tracking your progress heightens the commitment, helping you see what’s important, identify pitfalls, find trends, and celebrate successes. You wouldn’t take a class or play a sport without measuring success in some way, whether by grades or keeping score, so why not invest similarly in your own life?

(Rebecca Pratt, Goal-Tracking Tools: After Goal-Setting Comes Goal-Tracking, SparkPeople)

Before you can see how you’re progressing, you need to know your starting point. Take a few minutes to think about where you are in relation to your goal at the moment. Write down a sentence or two which describes this (if you want, use the comments box below).

For example, your goal might be “start my own business” and your current position might be “I have a business concept but I don’t know how viable it will be and I don’t have the skills I’ll need to carry it out, or the money and resources to launch the business”.

Decide on a time of day when you have five minutes or so to think about your progress on that goal. Figure out a sensible way to do so, perhaps using a tick-sheet, or jotting down relevant figures like word count, your weight, or your bank balance. If you can’t think of any other method, simply write down your current position each day, and you’ll see it changing over time as you get closer to your goal.

I’d love to hear about your goals and the ways you measure and track them, or any further thoughts and ideas on this topic: do share them in the comments!