3 Ways to Track Your Progress Toward Your Goals

It feels amazing when you can cross items off your to-do list, but are you celebrating your small wins and tracking your progress along the way?

We all want to hit the finish line and smash our goals, but it isn’t always that easy.

In order to stay committed to a goal and actually complete it, you need to find a way to track and measure your progress each day.

Being able to watch yourself move closer and closer to hitting your goal is a big motivator. It will help you to take inspired action each day so that you don’t give up.

Sometimes we tend to ignore all the little wins and start to feel defeated, or feel like we will never hit our goals.

It's hard when you create a big goal for your business because it can feel unattainable or even never-ending.

That’s why it's so important to track your progress and actually see it coming closer and closer to completion.

Even if you are not a visual person it’s good to create something to help you monitor your progress as you are working towards a long-term business goal.

We can easily get sidetracked with our blog or business and feel overwhelmed each day that we are working because it can be hard to track if what we are doing is helping us reach the desired outcome.

Here are 3 ways that I track progress to help prevent myself from giving up on my big goals:

#1 - Draw it

It might seem silly at first, but being able to see each step finished will help you to reach your goal.

For example, if your goal is to be featured on 10 podcasts then make yourself a quick way to track it so you can visually see the progress.

Not only is it nice to mark it off on your list, but you can visually see the progress you are making along the way. This will help you to create the steps you need to take to be featured on 10 total podcasts.

My sister is a real estate agent and I recently helped her to create a visual representation of how many clients she wanted to help to find their dream home this year.

Now, she can look at the poster in her office every single day to monitor her progress to motivate her to do what she needs to do each day to help them many clients this year.

Another example would be if you’ve set an income goal for your business to earn $5k a month. You will know when you’ve reached that exact outcome because you will be earning $5k in a month, but to help you stay on track and take the actions necessary to reach that goal you want to monitor your progress and celebrate when you hit the smaller milestones.

You could draw yourself some kind of progress tracker that you could fill in as you hit each monetary level.

#2 - Daily quota

Break down your goal into a simpler task for each day. This will allow you to mark it off as you complete. Not only does this help you to stay inspired, but you can track it along the way.

For example, maybe your goal is to write a book.

Set a number of words to write every single day.

You can easily create a task in your project management system to write 500 or even 1,000 words per day and then check it off as you along.

Doing this will give you a daily quota to hit so that you can break the book goal of writing a book into smaller chunks.

It's much easier to have a smaller number to hit daily rather than seeing that you need to write 50,000 words to complete your book.

Doing this will help you to create better habits so that you get into the routine of completing your quota every single day.

Again, you can easily make this for yourself.

Your daily quota will be different depending on what goals you set for your blog or business.

The point is to create a way to motivate yourself and make the long-term goal more doable on a daily basis.

Depending on your business, you could use this for how many sales calls you do per day, how many instagram pictures you comment on per day, how many pins you save per day, or even a particular time allotment working on a certain task.

#3 - Journal

Another way you can track your progress towards hitting a big goal is to write in a journal every day.

Even if it is only for 5 minutes a day, you can reflect on your progress and keep track of what you are doing.

Normally when I tell people to do this I am met with a lot of resistance. Journaling is just a way to get your thoughts out onto paper.

You don’t have to show it to other people or make it perfect.

It’s only for you.

This will allow you to go back and see what you’ve done and how you’ve felt through the process of actually hitting the goal.

Its fun to go back 3 months or even 6 months in my business and read about what I am doing. There are so many projects and ideas that I would have forgotten if I didn’t write it down inside of my journal.

I love looking back in it when I am feeling overwhelmed because it allows me to see all the progress I have made and the goals I did accomplish.

Instead of focusing on any current failures it helps me to reframe my mindset and look at the positive progress I have made for my own business goals.

Goals can be very overwhelming, but when you track your actions and celebrate the small wins it helps to keep you motivated.

Watching your progress will help you to take inspired action each day.

Do you use any of these methods?

Please share in the comments below how you track your progress toward your goals.