Tracking Your Progress Helps You Reach Goals

What the research found

Harkin and colleagues (2016) asked a simple question: does monitoring your progress toward a goal help you reach it? They gathered experiments that tested this and analysed them together: 138 studies with 19,951 participants in total, covering goals such as exercise, diet and study.

The results:

• Interventions that prompted people to monitor their progress greatly increased how often they actually did so (effect size d = 1.98).
• They also improved goal attainment (d = 0.40).
• The effects were larger when people reported their progress to others, and when they physically wrote it down rather than just checking in their heads.

In psychology, d = 0.40 is usually considered a small-to-medium effect. It is not dramatic, but given how little effort monitoring takes, it is worth having.

How to read it

This meta-analysis combines randomised experiments, so we can say that prompting people to monitor their progress led to better goal attainment. It is an average, though, and won’t show up the same way for everyone. Most of the goals in these studies were about health or learning, not job performance or income.

We did not find any study showing directly that recording your achievements leads to higher income. From here on, this is reasoning, not a research result.

In a US survey of new hires (Marks & Harold 2011), those who negotiated by openly discussing their position and reasons tended to have higher starting salaries. Explaining your reasons requires material. Whether in a performance review or a conversation about a raise, being able to say what you did and what came of it, with dates and numbers, affects how convincing you are. A short daily record is a natural way to build up that material.

A record has one more use. Looking back over a few weeks, you start to see which days or times you make the most progress and which kinds of tasks tend to stall. The research is about progress toward goals, but the same notes can also help you understand your own working patterns, which is useful when you plan the next week.

Three tips for turning notes into material

1. Include one number or fact. Instead of “made slides,” write “made the proposal deck; one of three options was adopted at the meeting.”
2. Once a week, put it into a form you can show someone. In the research, effects were larger when progress was shared. A weekly update to your manager or a trusted colleague is enough.
3. Once a quarter, pick your top three. Choose the items you’d want to bring up in a review or negotiation, so you don’t have to reconstruct everything from memory when the moment comes.

A small step for today

In the app, “Wrote one line on today’s progress” really is just one line. On days that didn’t go well, noting where you got stuck still counts.

The record isn’t for grading yourself; it is for using later. Six months from now, those single lines will be the material you have in hand for a performance review, or on a day you tick “Prepared for a negotiation.”

Sources

• [E4] Harkin et al. (2016) Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin.
• [C7] Marks & Harold (2011) Who asks and who receives in salary negotiation. Journal of Organizational Behavior.