Exercise: Measuring progress towards your goals

In the lesson on “Refining your goals,” you learned how important it is to make your goals as specific and well-defined as possible. These specific goals also make it easier to track your progress.

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight before, you may have found it highly motivating to weigh yourself every morning or once a week. If you have 12 pounds to lose, you can use a tracker to cross off every pound or half-pound lost, providing a sense of steady incremental progress.

Or, if you want to grow your savings fund, you can track your finances every single day and make a note of each dollar that hits your savings account. You can check off every $100 saved towards your $3000 goal — again, giving yourself a sense of regular, motivating progress.

Measuring progress toward your goals every single day can motivate you to keep going, tell you when your approach isn’t working, and help you stay accountable to your goals through the process of self-monitoring.

Tracking progress toward your goals

Let’s go back to the process goals we identified in the previous lesson and look at how we can track them:

• Eating a total of 1500 calories each day. Write down what we are consuming each day and calculate the number of calories.
• Going for a 30-minute walk after dinner each evening. On your calendar, circle the days you went for a walk and write how many minutes you walked each time.
• Working out in the gym for 60 minutes every day. Keep a gym journal in which you write down the days you go to the gym and how many minutes you worked out.
• Taking all your vitamins and supplements each day. Create a checklist of vitamins and supplements and check them off each day as you take them.

Two techniques for staying on track

You can start with either the Checklist method or the Don’t Break the Chain technique.

The Checklist method is simple: create a daily or weekly or monthly checklist of things that need to be done to achieve your goal, and don’t go to bed until it’s all checked off.

The Don’t Break the Chain Technique comes from comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

Here’s a quick explanation: “Each day that you complete your daily goal, you add an “x” to a calendar. Eventually, you build a chain of x’s that extends days, weeks, or months. This streak of accomplishments is increasingly rewarding and dissuades you from breaking the chain. Eventually, you’re able to build a long-term habit like daily journaling or morning stretching.” (Check out this article for further details and ideas).

Seinfeld’s method works for lots of reasons; namely:

1. It’s extremely simple – all you need is a pen and a piece of paper (or use a fun app on your phone, such as this one).
2. It feels like a little reward every time you keep the chain going.
3. You make visible progress on the calendar.
4. It forces you to focus on what you need to do right now.
5. It harnesses the power of small wins, which lead over time to big goals. As author Robin Sharma has said: “Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results.”

In the attached worksheet, write down how you are going to measure progress towards your goals and create your own daily tracker or checklist to track it.