Staying on Track with Your Goals: How to Measure Your Progress
In the corporate world, uttering the word “metrics” can invoke some not so pleasant feelings. Typically they’re applied to a financial or performance outcome. If you’re ex-corporate and the word metrics makes you break out in a sweat, fumble for a Xanax, hold up. Kick back into a little Nadi Shodhan and calm the F down. We’re flipping the switch and making friends with metrics today. Why? Because they’re pretty bad ass and we all need some bad ass in our corner, right?
One of the most important parts of goal setting is measuring your progress. When you measure your progress you can see where you’ve come from and where you’re headed. This is a powerful motivator to help you keep workin it. It gives you a realistic picture of the situation and lets you know when you need a change of strategy.
Here are some good ways to measure your progress:
Facts and Figures
No matter what type of goals you’ve set, find a way to quantify progress. If your goal is to build your online tribe and community engagement, this is easy to do. You can keep track in Facebook Fans, comment interaction or Twitter followers. If your goal is something that’s not easily quantifiable, like deepen my personal yoga practice, track it as a number of hours. For example, ‘I spent 6 hours this week practicing yoga.’ Better yet, track how your practice changes in pictures – absolutely quantifiable…
Stay on Schedule
In order to reach a goal, you need to break it into sub-goals and put them into some kind of timeframe. This is how you stay organized. It’s also a great way to chart your progress. You can see if you’re hitting your targets or not. Sticking to your schedule is important, but give yourself some flexibility. Those that don’t bend, break, yadda yadda yadda. The real point of setting these deadlines is to monitor progress. Change them as you go if you need to.
Keep a Journal
When you decide on your goal and you have the specifics worked out, write it down on the first page of a notebook. This notebook will be your goal journal. Set aside a little bit of time each day to write about how it’s going. Imagine that you’re writing a letter to your future self. Your journal entries don’t have to be long or incredibly detailed. Just write about what you did today and how you feel about it. Metrics can be warm and fuzzy too!
Tick It
Another even easier idea than a journal is to keep a simple tick sheet. When you complete a task, simply tick it off. You can create a tick sheet or find one online that you can download. As a Virgo and an attorney [which means my brain is a bit more sick and twisted than the average yoga junkie] check lists make my heart race. There are some really fab [FREE] online ones available these days including Asana and Wunderlist. And if you have money to burn, Basecamp personally makes me weak in the knees. If online task management isn’t your thing, a calendar is another way to do it. Tick sheets are great for marking off your daily tasks and sub-goals. They give you a visual representation of how far you’ve come.
Ratings and Rankings
You can keep track of your progress by creating your own rating and ranking system. Make a system that goes from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest. If, for example, you want to become more confident, you can monitor your confidence each day and rate it. A rating of 5 might mean you’re ready to take on the world; 1 means that you want to crawl into bed and hide! If you track your rankings over time, you can chart them out. This will give you a clear indication of your highs and lows throughout the month. Figuring out the pattern to your emotional roller coaster can help you approach yourself (life, business and other) with a bit more self care and self care is essential if you want to be a goal setting + achieving superstar.
Ain’t Nobody Got Time Fo That!
WRONG. Every health coach out there knows there’s always time to cook dinner (instead of grabbing some disease in a box at Micky D’s). Every Personal Trainer out there will tell you there are more than enough hours in the day to get a work out in. As your Yoga Business Coach + Trainer, I am telling you, there’s more than enough time in the day for you to organize and plan your business goals. Yes, I realize all of the suggestions above take time out of your busy schedule. When you’re working toward an important goal, you may feel that you don’t have much to spare. However, a little planning goes a long way and little bits of time that you take to measure your progress will benefit you considerably. Pinky Swear. The key is to decide how much time you can devote to measuring goal progress and choose a system that fits it.
Metrics turn you on now, right? Mmmmhmmm, thought so. Now get to it!
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