We all want to reach our goals, and as a result we sure love to see we are making progress. But it’s not uncommon that we tend to neglect the importance and power of progress tracking.
Research shows that people who track their progress are far more likely to reach their goals. The studies experimented on personal health goals such as losing weight, quitting smoking, changing diet or lowering blood pressure. Researchers found that prompting participants to monitor their progress toward a goal increased the likelihood that the participants would achieve that goal.
When it comes to tracking our goal progress, some goals are easy, such as losing 10 pounds in 3 months, you simply track how much you weigh regularly. But for other goals, finding a good metric to track your progress may not seem so obvious, such as finding your soulmate – how do you know you are actually making progress on that type of goal?
Therefore, different goals require different types of progress tracking. And that’s actually one of the key design ideas I integrated into GoalsOnTrack software. In GoalsOnTrack, you can track your goal progress in four different ways.
You can track your progress by the number of completed tasks, outcome from subgoals, outcome from completed tasks, or manual updating progress yourself.
1. By number of completed tasks – The total progress will be calculated based on how many tasks you have completed on the goal. Incomplete tasks will not be counted as progress.
2. By combined progress from sub goals – The main goal’s progress will be total sum of all progress from its sub goals. So to reach 100% on the main goal, all your sub goals must be 100% completed.
3. By task outcome – Similar to method #1, but instead of counting completed tasks, this method will add up all the outcome value from each completed task.
4. By manual updating – You can manually update a goal’s current progress without letting GoalsOnTrack to calculate it based on sub goals or tasks.
Different methods of progress tracking suit for different types of goals and will probably show different progress on the goal. Pick what most represents your ideal goal metrics. Though you can change the tracking method midway working through your goal, it’s always better to decide on a fixed method before you take too much action.
No matter which method of progress tracking you use, any tracking is always better than none at all. As the old saying goes, whatever get measured, gets improved.
___
This post was written by Harry Che, creator of GoalsOnTrack software.
