As part of my fitness self-improvement program, a few months ago I have purchased a heart-rate monitor. Since then, I’ve been logging my training stats on a daily basis. It’s been one of the greatest motivators I’ve ever found.
Whatever I do in my training session, I always feel great just by looking at my stats now and then. It’s not like I didn’t know that I was burning calories before, but knowing the exact amount helps a lot.
This reminded me of a great phrase I first heard when I was working for Sun Microsystems: That Which Is Measured, Improves. This principle worked for me back then, and it still helps me a lot with many daily activities. Read on to find out how.
Know where you stand
Measuring your progress is a very important step of reach any of your goals. Raising your own awareness of the progress you’re making is crucial to self-motivation. Recognizing the lack of progress made towards a goal is equally important, as it gives you a timely warning to correct your actions and realign with your goal.
Without knowing any measurable facts, you can easily deviate from your original plan, while believing you’re still on the right track. That’s why it is important to make sure that any plan of yours accounts for measuring your progress and verifying the achieved goals even when the project seems to be successfully finished.
I happen to do quite a lot of technical project management at work, and trust me – if there is the most important part of almost every project, it’s a test phase. Your original planning, preparation and even implementation of any project isn’t nearly as important as the test phase – because they are straight-forward and logically successive parts of the bigger plan. Testing, however, isn’t naturally part of your plan, and some think it can easily be skipped. But how else would you know if any of the earlier stages of your plan worked correctly and really helped you reach the goal?
Your implementation plan could be perfect – well planned, plenty of technical details, thoughtful sequence of actions and good time coordination. But a single human error – a typo or a split second distraction of a technical engineer – could cause a trouble, which will not be visible and may go unnoticed. If you skip testing in such a case, you may then believe you’ve got a successfully completed project. However, some or all of its major deliverables could be left unaccomplished and you wouldn’t even know. That’s why there is always a test plan. It looks simple, it seems stupid to re-do many steps just to verify everything works, but that’s the only way to ensure you know where you stand.
Measure your progress and use the data to correct your actions. The more often you get back to tracking your progress, the more aware and proactive you will be. Instead of working on something for days and weeks without really knowing is you’re moving in the right direction, just plan some checkpoints and make sure you analyze the measurements made. Even if you did everything correctly, such data will serve as an additional confirmation of your positive progress.
Get motivation
Quite often, people are much closer to reaching their goal than they think. However, they refuse to take a short break to acknowledge the progress, and opt instead to push harder and harder until they accomplish their goal completely. Does this work? It does. Is this the beast approach to reaching your goal? No, not even remotely!
We all perform much better when we like what we’re doing and enjoy seeing positive results. So taking just a few minutes a day (or even a week) to recognize the progress you’ve made so far is definitely worth the additional positiveness and motivation you’re bound to gain. Once you get into the habit of tracking your progress to further motivate yourself for the best results, you will really wonder why you never thought about this before. It is so much easier to be successful when you have proof of your steps already taken towards the goal!
Another motivating factor about measuring your success is the continuity of your improvement. Yes, it would be great if we could accomplish anything in a matter of minutes. But most self-improvement goals are long-term ones, which means there could be days, weeks and even years before you know that you’ve really accomplished your goal. It doesn’t mean you have to wait this long without really knowing if you’re doing the right thing at all or not! By measuring your success regularly, you will always know that your growth is slow but steady one, and this will server as an additional affirmation of the final goal being not only worthy, but also quite possible and real to achieve.
Discover new ways to improve
What I find really useful in tracking progress is how easy it is to discover new ways to improve yourself or the process in ways which you never thought of when you got started towards your goal. Everything in this world is interconnected, and by measuring your success you find out new connections and positive changes even in those areas which are not targeted directly.
Here are just a few examples of indirect benefits:
- Saving money creates the feeling of financial abundance.
You don’t have to be putting away your whole income – even if you save just a little sum, it will still benefit you in many ways. First – you will eventually end up with a planned amount of money. But even a bigger benefit to you will be the feeling of financial abundance you will have created after a short while. You will grow into thinking that you earn more than you really need, because with all your expenses, you still find it possible to put some money into your savings account. Knowing how much exactly you’re saving not only helps you feel safer, but also improves your financial confidence as you realize you can save increasingly more even staying on the same income level.
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Cardio training benefits you in many ways. Without measurements, I would simply know that a whole year of at least 3 gym sessions a week has improved me somehow. However, I was carefully taking notes, and that’s how I know that my heartbeat rate at rest has improved by 20 beats per minute, that I can run not 5, but 30 minutes flat out and easily cover distances between 5 and 7 km. You see, without numbers it wouldn’t seem as big a deal. Seeing exactly how much I’ve grown, I can push even harder to reach further goals in my fitness.
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Your website traffic is much more than just numbers. Typically, you would be interested to know how many people are reading your website. The more popular you become, the more closer look you take at your stats. First, you may only be setting goals like a few hundreds of visitors a months. Then, you realize that you want to also know how many of these are unique for a given month. A bit later you learn about the difference between visits and hits. Sooner that you might think, you’ll be aiming for a few hundreds and even thousands visitors a day! Now, how easy do you think it is to set and reach such specific goals without precise progress tracking? And what way is better to learn about all web stats parameters if not by starting simple monitoring of your website traffic?
Coming from a IT industry, I’m naturally drawn to precise measurements and progress tracking. That’s why it was easy enough for me to adopt similar approaches in my self-improvement. I clearly see the benefits of knowing where you are with any goals of yours, and I hope I’ve given you enough reasons to at least give it a try.
Do you have better examples of or reasons for progress tracking? Please let me know by leaving a comment!
I agree with this. I keep all my work-out logs too. I enjoy seeing the progress. Also, as you say Gleb, you need to be identifying drops in productivity too so that you can take a different approach.
Thanks for your comment, Mark!
I think as you get better, it’s especially important to track progress in case you’re doing something wrong but not seeing it without facts laid out on paper.
mark it is so important to have a reference point. reaching a goal is not instanteous. with a reference point and mile markers when you get discouraged you can always look back and see how far you came. the goal you are striving for may be cloer than you thought.
Yep Marcia. Almost always, I go beyonf the goal I wanted. I set an original goal, measure and improve as I go along and surpass my previous expectations. Without a refernce point this simply wouldn’t happen and I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it as much.
My point exactly!
Measurable results are there for indicative purpose – if you’re good, they’ll confirm this. If something’s wrong, they’ll highlight it. Always useful.
Great post Gleb. It’s so true, and so easy to forget. And what I really like about your post is that you give specific examples of using stats for improvement, not just for the sake of looking at stats! Thanks for the timely (for me) reminder to get back to tracking some of my key measures. I’ve been slacking a bit lately.
Glad you like it, Ed! Good luck with your key measurements!
I agree with you, To get improvement we need to know where we are. however, we also need to know which destination we want to go . because that is the direction we want to choose. after that we can keep motivation to get what we want to.
I agreed with you that while setting goal, we can easily deviate from our original plan, while believing we’re still on the right track, not knowing the important to make sure that any plan has to be constanly measured its progress and verifying the achieved goals even when we have successfully completed a task.
Great post, I keep a workout journal and it has been great for me to track my progress and to expand more training as I meet the goals I set for myself. I also have applied this process of tracking progress in all the things in my life I want to expand my success. I journal regularly and always amaze myself when I flip back and read all the things I have and continue to achieve by being focused and knowing what I want.
Great blog and I have added it to my list.
Hi Matthew,
Thanks for sharing your experience! Yes, workout journal is a great invention – I use it myself and with weight lifting.
Thanks for becoming a regular reading, talk to you again!
Everybody should have goals and stay motivated with those goals to achieve them.
Because Goals keeps you focused and when you are focused you do actions and actions always gives results…
When you have an new idea on generating income do immediate action on it if you think that you will success..
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Thanks for stopping by, Muzamil!
Great Blog here :)
“The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.”
Andrew Carnegie
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Hello. I am a postgraduate student and I identify with the lack of motivation that comes with not knowing where you stand. Unfortunately, my default mode is to push on until the goal is accomplished. I now know better. Thank you for a great article.
All the best in reaching your goals, Cleyson!
Yes, I completely agree with this post. If you never have a goal, you will never know where you are going. At least if you set a goal and check it periodically, you can move in a positive direction. Some people think goals are static. Almost, everytime I look at my goals, they change and improve.
Great Post Gleb.
Thanks, Carrie! Goals can be moving targets, but it’s important to strike the balance where you achieve them and enjoy the process instead of feeling discouraged by the seemingly unattainable goal.
but, it;s not good tracking too often.
thanks for the article
:)
Thanks for your comment, Aldohas! I wasn’t trying to encourage people track everything every minute, so I agree with you – too much tracking can harm. This being said, it’s better to overdo tracking than to go about your training or any other goal achievement without a slightest idea of where you started and where you eventually want to be.
“Measuring your progress is a very important step of reach any of your goals. Raising your own awareness of the progress you’re making is crucial to self-motivation.”
I agree with this in the fact hat preparation and keeping measurements are key steps to reaching one’s goal. However I personally have never actually kept track of the sets and weights when I lift at the gym, and still have stayed reasonably motivated. I have seen improvements from the past year’s and this in itself has kept me motivated. I believe if you do not have the inner desire to succeed and stay healthy tracking exact measurements will do no good. The desire to succeed and improve comes from within, not through data.
Thanks, Raj! Yes, desire for success is the strongest motivation.
Yes, Gleb, you are right about the balance thing. However, I am a person who enjoys challenge and can see my progress throughout. I guess I kind of meant that there are several mini goals that lead up to one larger final “goal”. It’s nice to see and talk on sites that have real people responding to them.
I see now, Carrie!
Yes, I love bigger goals too and tend to treat smaller efforts as tasks, not even mini-goals.
Thanks for coming back!
Great post! 100% spot on. I just wanted to say how many times goals have benefited my life. There are so many times where I don’t think I would have succeeded or pushed myself as far as I did if I did not set a goal. Great post
Thanks, Kirk! Yes, goals are the way to go!
thank you for sharing this great article. i better start to keep track of my goals to see how much i progress on achieving the goals i set. more power on you gleb!
Hi,
Nice post. I myself keep track of my progress in the gym. I take notes regularly. And to keep me motivated, I blog about my progress and have people comment and critique on it.
Even though I hate maths, I love numbers when it comes to maintaining motivation for completing our goals. It’s good to look back on what you’ve achieved. It makes things easier when you look back at your progress as well as looking forward to your goal. Excel is great to keep records and then create some cool graphs for this.
This is so true, and sadly lot of people miss this, just simple act of tracking things will improve it at a subconscious level.