Depending on your goal, your progress might be incredibly slow. This makes it hard to stay on track, especially when it’s so slow that it seems as though you aren’t making any progress at all. In order to help you stay on the right path, you need to begin tracking your progress – no matter how small and incremental it may be. Otherwise, you’ll find that your progress has halted or that you’ve fallen off the track.
Measuring Your Goals
So, what should you measure? You know what your main goal is, and you’ve already identified your why. Now it’s time to track your progress. Basically, anything that you’ve done to help move towards that goal is worth noting. No matter what your goals are, you need to measure them in some quantifiable way. You may need to get creative with this!
Why Do You Need to Measure Your Goals?
To put it simply, measuring your goals can show you how much progress you’ve made. You won’t meet every goal overnight. This is impossible. However, you can slowly track your goals in order to see where you’re at with them.
In addition to this, measuring your goals will help you stay on track. If you don’t measure them, then you don’t know if you’ve made any progress. This can make you feel discouraged, and you’ll end up giving up on your goals. However, if you can see that some visible progress, no matter how tiny, has been made, then you’ll know that you’re on the right track. Forward motion is very important!
Measuring Your Progress
No matter what, every goal needs to be measured constantly, much like how they all must have a “why.” However, every one of them will be measured differently. This is because they’re all different. You can’t track a goal like “get promoted at work” like you can one that involves completing a book. One is easily measurable (you get that promotion) while the other will take place slowly.
Spend some time thinking about your goals before you try to find ways to measure them. The ideas will come to you. Once they do, write them down and set up a goal tracker.
Goal Trackers
A goal tracker is a place where you’ll track your goals. (This seems obvious, right?) These goal trackers need to have three important components:
- What your goal is and how you plan on measuring it.
- How often you’re going to measure that goal – daily, weekly, monthly
- A place where you can write down those measurements.
Your goal tracker can be:
- The Read. Write. Hustle. Be a #GoalGetter Planner
- A journal
- A notebook
- A computer spreadsheet
- A simple piece of paper
- A note keeper on your smartphone
- Anything where you can write down those goals and track them
- Be creative!
I hope these suggestions have given you some food for thought and that you now understand the benefits of measurement in goal setting and are feeling more confident in the process.
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Love Nanowrimo for their word count trackers and graph. They now have one you can use anytime of the year and you set your own time-frame and word count goal. All the other ideas you have given are useful too. I work better even if it is to a digital goal.