Simple Ways to Track Your Progress Towards Your Personal Goals

Setting personal goals is essential. Be it geared towards your business, job, or self-improvement, the need to see a set goal to its completion is inbred into our DNA. But alas, seeing things to completion sometimes might be a tad bit difficult. This is because smaller or shorter-term goals are pretty easier to complete as opposed to long-term goals. Long-term goals sometimes arent always finished in a day, week, months, or even years.

To stay focused on these personal goals, there is a need to track progress and milestones accomplished. In this post, we would be reviewing simple methods to track progress on our set goals.

BREAK THE GOAL INTO SMALLER MILESTONES

Your personal goal might be long-term or short-term. If the goal looks like it might take some time to accomplish, then it’s time to “break it down”. Take an overview of the entire goal and pick out points that you would consider milestones. In essence, break down the goals into sub-goals and place tags to each sub-goal to measure yourself when you have achieved it. This would help you complete a seemingly impossible goal efficiently.

For example, say you have a professional exam that has ten papers. You could choose to break it up to 2 papers every quarter, and in about one year and three months, you would have cleared them. The seemingly massive ten-paper course has been broken down to 2 papers every three months (which is easier to take on).

MONITOR EACH SUB-TASK

Now that you have broken down your goal to sub-tasks, you would have to monitor them. A goal that isn’t monitored will not be completed. Set a timeline for each task; it could be days, weeks or even months. The timeframe for each job might differ, but that’s ok. Set timelines that, at the end of, you would measure if you have completed the task assigned to that timeline. And if you haven’t, you adjust the timeline and get to work again. Setting timelines to goals helps your subconscious stay aware that there is a task at hand that must be finished before a set time.

An internal clock keeps ticking, and this pushes you to work towards your personal goals.

REWARD EVERY SUB-GOAL ATTAINED

Reaching your ultimate goal might seem daunting but in the midst of it all, give yourself something to keep you going. For every sub-goal, you get, make it a duty to reward yourself. Unknown to you, this spurs you on subconsciously to keep going until you hit the last mark. How is this, you may ask?

Ok, let’s break it down a bit. It’s like training a child. For each instruction the child gets correctly, he/she is rewarded with candy. Additionally, this would spur on the child to keep striving to get each one right. Likewise, in your pursuit to attain the goal. Set “treats” at the end of each sub-task. This would push you to try to each task done to get your reward.

DOCUMENT YOUR PROGRESS

Always keep a journal to track your progress towards your personal goals. Documentation of progress is crucial as it reminds you of where you started and where you are headed. Keeping tabs either electronically or with pen and paper tends to remind and also push you towards the completion of each set of tasks.

Keep notes of your successes, failures, new things you tried, and how they worked out for you. Keep notes of everything, and trust me, in the end, you would be glad you did.

BE ACCOUNTABLE TO SOMEONE

This can not be over-emphasized. Except you are working on a personal goal you don’t want to share with anyone else, it’s always nice to have someone watch over you. It could be your mentor or someone that has some sort of authority over you. Furthermore, the person should always be there to put you in line and help you persevere to achieve that set goal. He/she could help you track your journey towards accomplishing the set target, and in the end, you would be glad you had the person by your side.

Moreover always be accountable to someone. Tracking your progress towards your personal goal could sometimes be an arduous task if proper measures aren’t taken. This is because you can easily be side-tracked by a whole lot of life interferences. But we have summarized some of the simple ways to help you keep on track to attain that goal. Program your mind for success and go on ahead to achieve it.