Ways to Track Your Goals

So now we have a bunch of goals, now what? Well, now we have to track them! There is no use trying to keep all your goals in your head. Don’t worry! I’ve got some ideas. In this post, I’ll cover:

• Determining your goal cadence,
• My current favorite way of tracking my own goals,
• And some links to other posts that may give you some inspiration!

This is the fourth step in the Goals series. If you haven’t read through the other three posts in this series, head on over and check it out! These tips will still apply even if you don’t, however.

Determine Your Cadence

One thing to determine first, is how often you want to check in on each goal. Some may be things you want to do daily. Whereas, others you want to set at the monthly level, and yet others might be annually or even longer.

The things you may want to track daily are probably the tasks or habits related to your higher level goals. Some of my daily habits or mini-goals are related to:

• The number of steps I get in a day
• The number of calories I eat in a day
• What time I want to go to bed
• What time I want to wake up.

These seem small and innocuous, but for me these are things I struggle with. As I start doing them regularly, I’ll move on to other goals or create a bigger challenge for these ones. If you did the other steps in the goals series, you’ll notice these are all related to my high level goal of creating a healthy lifestyle.

Monthly vs Daily

The thing to remember is, monthly goals are a great way of having a shorter period of time in which to accomplish something that is important to you, but doesn’t require a daily check in. For example, some of my current monthly goals relate to the number of times I want to cook a “real” dinner and how much I want to have in my new savings account by the end of the month. These monthly goals are also relevant to my higher level goals for healthy lifestyle and supporting my family.

As you may imagine, annual or lifetime goals are probably the ones you are supporting with your task and action item goals. You may not need to check on them daily or monthly.

Whatever kind of goal it is though, write it down somewhere. Then, track each of your goals in some way. This is an important step towards seeing your goals happen.

My Favorite Way of Tracking Goals

The way I’m using right now to track my goals is to keep a daily journal. I’ll get more into journaling in October, however there is part of journaling that has relevance here. I have a few pages I work on for a few minutes every day, whic help me stay focused on my goals and track my progress.

Journal Pages

• Year Collection. I have a year page where I have my months listed out with 5-6 small monthly goals I want to accomplish that month. I check on it weekly to remind myself what my goals are and keep them at the forefront of my mind.
• Habit Tracker. I have a habit tracker page for each month where I can make an “x” for each day that I do each habit. I’ve listed some habits that I find easy to do, and some that I’m not doing enough. They are all in support of my mission statement and high level goals. However, I don’t necessarily have a goal to do them every day. I’m trying to cultivate these activities into habits by tracking how often I do them.
• Simple Graphs. Several pages in my journal have simple little graphs to show how I’m doing. An example is my savings goal. I started a new savings account, and each month I have a goal to see it grow by $50. It’s not much, but each month it will be more than I had before. I check my balance every other day to fill in my graph.
• Weight Loss Gauge: One of my major goals right now is to lose weight. So, I have a page with my super goal and my starting weight, and I fill it in as I progress. Kind of like a thermometer-style tracking system you might have last used in elementary school.

Publication

A final way that I recently started on my personal blog is a monthly goal report. I will be defining what my goals are for the upcoming month, and giving myself a grade on how I did on my goals for the previous month. Even if I’m the only one that reads them, I find there is a lot of power in publishing my goals. It helps me feel more accountable to accomplishing them. If you’re interested, I will post the link to my first goal report which will come out on September 1.

And All Kinds of Other Ways

Fortunately for those of you allergic to journaling, keeping a hand-written journal is just one way of tracking goals. People are using Excel, phone apps, reminders on their phones, you name it. A quick Google search listed a whole bunch of posts others have already worked on with a lot of these ideas. So rather than list those ideas as my own, here are a few round up posts that have some great ideas!

Unfortunately, many of the posts I found were older and/or mentioned the same apps mentioned in these two articles. It sounds like some of the best mechanisms might be Excel, a note-taking tool like Evernote or OneNote, or just good old pen and paper.

• 20 Brilliant Ways to Track Your Goals | Creative Market – This post lists bullet journaling, as well as some other ideas I thought were interesting. Some examples are a Kanban board and GTD, which I had to go look up to find that it stands for Getting Things Done. GTD is a personal productivity methodology, and you can find out more about it here.
• 7 Tools to Help Keep Track of Goals | Lifehack.org – This is an older post, but I found Joe’s Goals (also mentioned in the previous post) to be interesting. Evernote is also one of my favorite things, so I thought this post was useful.