Do you want to know how to successfully monitor your progress towards your goals?
Setting goals is easy, but to ensure you meet your goals, especially your long-term goals you’ll need to put a monitoring system in place. Keep on reading to find out 4 questions to ask yourself to ensure you successfully monitor your progress towards your goals
4 questions to ask yourself to ensure you successfully monitor your progress towards your goals
Question 1: What do I need to be monitoring to ensure I’m making progress towards my goals?
When it comes to monitoring the first thing you need to decide is what you are going to monitor. Usually, there are two ways you can approach monitoring. You can measure the input and you can measure the output. For example, if you have a goal of losing weight you could measure the input (how many calories you’ve eaten and how much exercise you’ve done) and you could measure the output (how much weight you’ve lost and how many inches or centimetres you’ve lost of your bust, waist and hips).
Often it is easy to focus on the output as more often than not the output relates directly to your goal. However, there are major benefits of measuring both your input and your output. It could be that you aren’t getting the results you desire and don’t meet a key milestone towards your goal. When you have monitored your input and output you can look and see whether you haven’t got the results you want because you didn’t take the necessary actions or that you took what you thought was the necessary actions and still didn’t get the results. Having this insight can allow you to make informed choices about what to do next.
Question 2: How often should I be monitoring my progress?
The first question you need to ask yourself is “How often should I be monitoring my progress?”. You are monitoring your progress to help ensure that you keep on track with where you need to be in relation to achieving finally achieving your goal. Monitoring your progress is important otherwise you can fall behind and not even be aware. To ensure that doesn’t happen you’ll need to work out how often you need to be reviewing your progress. Depending on how long you anticipate the goal to take you, you might decide to monitor your progress on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
For example, if you have a goal to save £30,000 for a house deposit and you anticipate it taking you 5 years then monitoring your progress daily probably isn’t necessary, but monitoring on a monthly basis makes sense. However, if your goal is to write a 10,000-word book proposal by the end of the month then monitoring how many words you’ve written on a daily basis would be sensible.
Question 3: What is the best way for me to record my progress?
You know what you need to monitor and how often, but with so many ways of recording your progress, you’ll need to decide what makes sense for you. Some options to consider are:
- An app – Have you checked whether there is an app that could help you easily monitor your progress. For example, if you have a goal to run a marathon and are following a training programme that identifies how many miles you need to run each week then there are numerous apps that you can use to track your running.
- A calendar or diary – If you have a goal that requires you to do or monitor something daily, then a calendar or diary could be a great way to ensure that you complete the action daily and don’t break the chain. (Find out more about ‘don’t break the chain’ here).
- A bullet journal – Some people swear by using a bullet journal to keep track of their progress. This is especially useful for goals that involve a list, but might not be closely tied to a calendar, for example, writing down the list of books you read in a year.
- A graph – If you are a visual person then you may find a visual way of tracking your progress. For example, you could create a line graph to track you losing weight or you could create a bar chart to show how your savings are growing month on month.
As you can see there are lots of ways to record your progress and just because you decide one way is right for one goal doesn’t mean you need to use the same method for all your goals. Feel free to think about what method makes sense for each goal individually.
Question 4: How can I ensure that I monitor my progress?
At this stage, you have made all the decision you need to make to successfully monitor your progress towards your goals. However, what can you do to ensure that you actually stick with the monitoring process you’ve put in place. Most people benefit from having reminders whilst they are trying to form a new habit or by having some form of accountability.
If you’ve decided to use the calendar to monitor your progress you could put it somewhere visible that you know you’ll see it every day. If you’ve decided to use an app set a notification to remind you to update the information.
For big goals, you might even decide to get external accountability from a friend, family member, mentor or coach.
There you have it. You now know 4 questions to ask yourself to ensure you successfully monitor your progress towards your goals.
I really hope reading this blog post has helped you to get clear on what you need to do to ensure you successfully monitor your progress.
Regularly monitoring your progress will help to keep your goals top of mind and ensure that you are moving in the right direction, so I really hope you action what I’ve suggested.
In the comments, I would love to know how you’ve decided to monitor one of your big goals at the moment.
