Trying to get stuff done? If you're doing anything you care about, or anything significantly challenging, you can get there faster by having solid methods to track your progress.
Whether you're exercising, collaborating on a project at work, or trying to help solve some of the world's biggest problems, you'll need to measure your success along the way. If you prepare well before you really get started you'll know if you're making good time, letting you see the finish line and move towards it more quickly.
So here are 6 methods for tracking your progress that you can adapt to a variety of problems, big and small.
Start/Finish
Simply tracking the beginning and end of tasks can be appropriate for short to-do's. It may sound too simple at first, but you can classify tasks in different ways to build in some nuance.
The Start/Finish method gives each task a percentage of progress when it's started, and then the other portion when it's finished. Different actions can be initiated when each portion is filled. You can make different rules for different situations:
50/50 Rule: For simple tasks. Mark as 50% complete when begun, and the rest when finished.
20/80 Rule: For more important tasks or activities that will take longer to complete.
0/100 Rule: Tasks like this are only valuable or require action from other people when they are fully complete.
Scheduling
Your schedule could be based on a variety of things. Think of the constraints you're working under, and the resources you'll use to reach your goal.
Are you working under a deadline, like a project launch? Do you have a set of goals to reach, milestones spaced out over a period of time?
Or are you working with a budget, and once it runs out you're through? Maybe you're working with other non-monetary resources, like construction materials or the schedule constraints of employees and coworkers.
Customer Satisfaction
Whatever you're doing, there must be some end-users. That could even be you.
You can track your progress by soliciting feedback from whoever will be using or benefiting from your project. You'll probably need some kind of work-in-progress, demo, or progress report to show.
The more personal and honest the feedback you get at early stages, the better.
Expert Feedback
Rather than looking for eventual customers or users, you can also find industry experts to weigh in with their opinions.
Unlike some other methods of tracking progress, which use specific data points, this one is often more qualitative than quantitative. However, to complement that, you can also create some questionnaires with specific answers for reviewers to fill in.
Units Completed
Keeping track of how many units you complete, in some way, is one of the best ways to track progress. To do this you'll need to identify some repeatable tasks that you can measure.
Every unit should take about the same amount of time and effort, so keeping track of units completed over time will give you an idea of how fast you're moving. If you're exercising, units could be reps or sets. If you're working on a long project over time, units could be progressive iterations.
Use Apps/Services
There are a ton of apps, services, and tools to help you track your progress, motivate yourself, and find new ways to improve.
Here are a few:
What do you use to track your progress and keep yourself moving steadily towards your goals? Let us know in the comments below, we'd love to hear from you!
Do you need some big goals to work towards? Check out the HeroX challenge page, find one that speaks to you, and try putting some of these methods to use!
