How do you know when you are done?
Track Progress
Listen to Coach Steve talking about
Tracking Your Progress
There is an achievement axiom that you might have heard that is as powerful as any: “what gets measured gets done.” Though that little saying is pretty self explanatory – let’s look at it closely.
In order to truly set yourself up for achieving the goals that you set, it is imperative that your goal is set in measurable terms. A simple way to check that is to ask, “would an independent observer – someone that doesn’t know anything about me, be able to tell if I have achieved my goal or not?” For example, a person you don’t know would not be able to tell whether or not you make “more money” or not. They could, on the other hand, be able to tell whether or not you make $10,000 a month by simply looking at a pay check.
So if your goals as set in measurable terms, then you should also be able to measure incremental progress between where you started and where you are going. Now here is the subtle but incredibly important key: if you don’t measure your progress on your way to the goal, and instead only measure yourself on a pass/fail basis on simply whether the goal is achieved or not – yes or no – then you are setting yourself up for frustration, derailment and disappointment.
Goal achievement requires measuring progress and measuring progress is important for 5 reasons:
- You won’t have anything to celebrate and therefore encourage yourself if you don’t measure the incremental steps of progress you make toward a goal.
- You will always get frustrated with how long you are taking to achieve a goal unless you focus on progress rather than the end result only.
- Because you have never achieved the goal before, you will experience many new things along the trail to the goal. If you aren’t measuring, you will miss important cues for when or if it might be necessary to adjust your goal based on new information or insight.
- It will be easy to change your mind about a goal and unconsciously give up if you aren’t keeping it in front of your face with some sort of tracking system.
- If you don’t measure you won’t have any benchmarks that will help you intelligently set new goals in the future. You need to know how long it takes, what resources you needed, where you get distracted of sidetracked…all sorts of things when you get ready to set a new goal. Otherwise, you will find yourself having to learn the same stuff all over again.
This week, if you have not already done so, set up a tracking method for the goals you have set. Don’t get too fancy: a spiral note book that you write in every few days is fine. The main thing is that you have someplace to keep your goals AND your goal achievement in front of your face with progress measured.
