How to Track Progress and Boost Motivation with Your Goals
Last week I set out to find a way to keep better track of my habits and record how I’m doing so that I actually know how I’m doing. Since then, it’s been an interesting adventure of trying to find good information on how to develop and track good habits.
It was actually surprisingly difficult to find much useful and unique information on how to track habits. I scoured the internet, looking high and low looking for practical ways to track my habits as I work through my 52 week challenge.
What I found was mostly just variations on a few of the same ways of tracking habits. And most of those methods focused more on motivation than on accurate record keeping. There were two main challenges I faced when looking for methods to track my habits:
Challenge 1 was that most tools focused only on daily habits. There weren’t any tools that dealt with both daily habits and habits that happen with less regularity. Granted, most of my habit goals are daily ones, and the daily ones are the ones that I have most success with. However, not all habits can (or should) be daily. So I needed something with more flexibility.
Challenge 2 was that none of the systems I found actually tracked detailed information. Each tool tracked whether or not the minimum threshold of the goal was met, but didn’t track any more detailed information. I don’t want to just know that I’ve been meeting my minimum goals, I want to know exactly how much I’m accomplishing in each of my habits.
So here’s what I settled on.
My favorite method I found was the Seinfeld Method, also called the “Don’t Break the Chain”, method. With this method what you do is you take a calendar, pick a daily goal, and put an X through each day that you complete your goal. This method of tracking accomplishes two things:
- It keeps track of how many days you met your goal, versus how many you didn’t, and;
- It motivates you to keep from “breaking the chain,” so that the more you succeed the more you’re motivated to keep on succeeding.
It also has weaknesses though:
- The motivational piece doesn’t work for weekly habits;
- The X doesn’t actually record any more data than that the minimum threshold of the goal was met, and;
- 18–26 calendars is a lot of calendars.
This is a lot of pros and cons (more cons than pros), but I figured out how to modify it to fit my purposes.
What did was create a spreadsheet on my laptop that has a row for each habit and a column for each day of the month. I repeated that in other tabs for the rest of the months of the year with an extra tab to tally the cumulative totals for all the months. In each cell I’m recording how I’ve done on each habit (how many ounces of water I drink, how many minutes I work out, etc.) for each day, and if I succeeded in meeting my habit I will shade the cell in green. For weekly habits, I’ll shade the whole week green at the end of the week if I succeeded for that week.
I’m confident that this method will give me both the motivational benefits of the Seinfeld method, as well as more detailed data so I can know exactly how well I’m doing. It also enables me to keep all of my tracking in one simple system, which will be essential to me sticking to it. And, perhaps most importantly, it keeps my habits in front of me on a daily basis, which will help me be more successful in each one.
I started to use this system as of last Tuesday. However, as I use it, I want to work on improving it. I want to get the bugs out, write good instructions for it and figure out how to make it available on the website so that it can benefit you!
While we wait to make that a reality, though, here are some of the best resources I found online:
- The Seinfeld Method — Lifehacker
- How to Measure Progress in your Personal Goals — Buffer Blog
- 7 Apps to help you achieve your goals and build new habits — Michael Hyatt
What do you think of my system? Do you have any suggestions for me? Is there anything you would be concerned about if you were trying to use it? Please comment below and let me know!
