Day 15: Monitor Your Progress + Close the Gap
It’s just not possible to stay productive and maintain your motivation to make things happen without feedback… You’ve got to know how much progress you’ve made and how much more you’ve got left before you get to the finish line.
The human brain is wired to detect gaps—particularly gaps in where we are right now vs where we want to be.
And this “gap recognition” comes in especially handy when you’re working on tasks that lead you towards a larger goal.
Yah see, when your brain detects a gap, it responds by elevating your brain and body’s resources:
- your attention sharpens
- your energy, effort, and willpower get a boost, and
- it heightens your ability to process new knowledge + information
It’s kind of like when Iron Man puts on his suit—everything powers up and gets elevated to the max.
But when your brain doesn’t detect any gaps between where you are and where you want to be, it can’t monitor how much progress you’re making. When you don’t know how far you’ve come with respect to a goal you’re striving to reach, the gap isn’t clear to your brain—and this causes us to procrastinate and experience lack of motivation.
It’s the gap that triggers us to take action. Without it, nothing gets done.
Each time you’re working to make progress on a goal or project of any kind, you’re going to need regular feedback about your progress—how far you’ve come, and how much more you’ve got left to go.
So, how do you go about monitoring your progress?
To-Date Thinking vs To-Go Thinking
There are two basic ways most people revert to when they think about monitoring their progress:
1: TO-DATE Thinking — this is when you focus on how far you’ve already come.
- Example: you’re working on a project, and you think about all the steps you’ve completed and made progress on to-date.
2: TO-GO Thinking — this is when you focus on how much more you’ve got left to accomplish.
- Example: you’re working on a project, and you think about how you’ve only got two more tasks to-go before you’ve completed it.
Which of the two approaches above do you think is more conducive to your ability to take action, stay productive, and make things happen?—to-date thinking, or to-go thinking?
Both approaches sound good, but only one of them can help you maintain your motivation until you’ve accomplished all the tasks associated with a given goal; while the other approach can lead to a premature feeling of accomplishment, which can actually lower your drive and motivation to get things done…
And the winner is…
TO-GO Thinking.
Here’s why TO-GO thinking is more effective than TO-DATE thinking:
Too much to-date thinking (focusing on what you’ve already achieved) can kill your motivation and sabotage your ability to finish what you start. How can that be? Researchers tell us that when we’re working toward a goal and thinking about how far we’ve already come, we tend to experience a premature sense of accomplishment and start taking it easy (because it feels like we’ve already “done so much”).
Another crucial downside of to-date thinking is this: When we focus on how much progress we’ve already made, we tend to try and balance things out in other parts of our lives by making progress in those areas as well. This results in a forest full of trees, but no fruits to harvest.
On the flipside though, if we practice to-go thinking—placing our focus on how much more we have left to go—we not only maintain our motivation, but we boost it as well.
Bottom line: when you’re monitoring your progress, focus on your goal and the steps you have left until you get there. Don’t spend too much time thinking about your past accomplishments. Instead, focus on thinking about how much more you can accomplish in the future.
How to use this make it happen method
When we’re accomplishing goals and making things happen, regularly reviewing and monitoring our progress is important. If you don’t know how you’re doing, you can’t adjust your actions and strategies accordingly. Here’s how to get started with monitoring your progress.
STEP 1.
Figure out how often you’ll monitor your progress.
Determine how often you plan to monitor the progress you’re making on each of your most important goals. How often you monitor your progress depends mainly on the size of the goal and the timeline attached to it:
- Long-range goals that take 1-year or more to accomplish should be reviewed at least every 1–3 months.
- Monthly goals should be reviewed once a week (I review mine every Monday morning when I plan my week.)
- Weekly and Daily goals should be monitored on a daily basis.
If you’ve gone through the process of using the Drill Down Method to create your goals, it’s a lot easier to assess your progress because all your actions for each of your major goals are clearly mapped out — what you need to do today is connected to what you need to do this week, which is connected to what you need to do this month, which is connected to what you need to do this year and beyond.
STEP 2.
Decide how you’ll monitor your progress.
Will you monitor your own progress, or will you need an outside source to help you?
Depending on what you’re striving to make happen, you can:
- monitor your own progress by using a notebook, planner, or tracker;
- get feedback about it from someone else (like an accountability partner, or your boss at work),
- or you can use an app to monitor your progress (like a sleep tracker if you want to get better sleep, or a productivity app to keep track of your tasks).
STEP 3.
Create reminders for yourself to monitor your progress.
Don’t try to remember to do it—you won’t. Your mind is made for creating things, not storing them. Use a calendar, planner, or sticky notes to remind yourself on a recurring basis to check in on how much further you’ve got left to-go until you’ve accomplished a goal or project.
STEP 4.
Stay motivated by thinking about closing the gap.
To maintain your motivation as you monitor your progress and take action on your goals and projects, always be sure to think about what still needs to get done in order for you to reach each of your goals—that is, think about how far you’ve got left to-go, instead of how far you’ve already come.
References
- Koo, M., & Fishbach, A. (2014). Dynamics of self-regulation: How (un)accomplished goal actions affect motivation. Motivation Science, 1(S), 73–90. https://doi.org/10.1037/2333–8113.1.S.73