Why you should be tracking your personal metrics if you want to achieve your goals in 2023
In this post I’m going to share why I think it’s important to track your personal metrics if you want to achieve the goals you’ve set this year, and how I’ve been going about doing this myself.
— It’s a good idea to have a regular time to check in on your progress each month —
Without doing this important step, you’ll really have no idea how you’re tracking and whether you’re making any progress at all.
The biggest thing I see at the start of the year are lots of ambitious personal visions - things that are going to get done - but unfortunately these really don’t last too long without that person making a proper plan on how they are going to be accomplished.
As part of that plan, they should also be tracking how they’re going.
Here are five reasons why it’s a good idea to start doing this for yourself if you do have some goals you want to achieve this year:
You’ll have an accurate measurement of your progress along the way.
You can course correct quicker when you see the info in front of you.
If you feel like you haven’t achieved as much as you’d like to, you can look at the facts and work out if you’ve really done as much work as you need to do to get it done.
You can look back on how far you’ve come over the year (or years!) and be proud of your progress.
You’ll gain more confidence from the evidence that you can achieve what you set your mind to.
Why tracking your metrics are the key to your success
The more often you can objectively track your own personal data, the more confidence and proof you’ll give yourself that you are making progress.
It’s so easy to get up in your head and have negative self talk, but when you see your stats in front of you this can be both very motivating and reassuring (as well as confronting).
It also means that if you do have confirmation that says you aren’t making as much progress as you’d like, it’s a lot easier to tweak what you’re doing as you go rather than flying blindly through life hoping that your goals will just materialise.
When I first started looking at my own tracking this past year, I found it was much easier to be accountable to myself as I knew how much work was involved in working towards my goals.
For example:
Each week, I’ve been tracking my strength training progress and walking distances to tick off a personal goal of building a regular exercise habit.
Seems simple enough to do but it’s a great activity because at the end of the month I can see where there are now pockets of the month where I don’t have as much energy as usual, or where my energy levels are higher. If I haven’t been feeling good about myself, it’s usually because I’ve skipped a couple of days of working out.
This then allows me to start planning forward >> for those times where I know I’ll feel more energetic and start scheduling in harder workouts to reap the benefits.
How to track your progress + some simple steps to stay accountable
These are the things I’d recommend you try if you want to give this a go:
Make a date with yourself to check your progress at regular intervals.
I like to do this on the weekends during my planning session and also at the end of the month before I set next month’s goals.
It could be a simple as spending 10 mins each week reviewing your goals and making sure you’re on track, it doesn’t need to be too formal.
Keep a habit tracker of some kind in your planner, or make a simple digital system for yourself.
Mine is kept in Notion and I input my info in at the end of the month after I spend a bit of time writing everything down first during the month while I’m tracking it.
There are also plenty of apps where you can record your data and these can help to keep you accountable to yourself too.
Find an accountability partner or group to check in with. These are helpful because you become accountable to someone else rather than yourself and those people are much less likely to let you off the hook than you would! I have recently joined a Live Cohort of a course I’m doing and I have an accountability partner that I check in with each week to make sure I’m doing the work that’s required - it’s been great for keeping me motivated!
What sorts of things should you be tracking?
Well, this depends on what goals you have.
I’ll give you a couple of examples of categories below what I think you should be tracking in those areas, but I’m sure there are others that will be more specific to you.
The important thing is that you have some kind of feedback mechanism for yourself so you can see if you’re tracking well against your goals over time or not.
>>Exercise
Time + distance measurements
Resistance or weights
How many reps?
Physical measurements (if that’s important to you)
Energy levels during the month so you can start to see a pattern
How often you’re working out
>>Healthy eating
Food choices
Macro + micro nutrients
Supplements and how they make you feel afterwards
Pathology tests (I like to get a blood test every year to check my nutrient levels)
Symptoms or adverse reactions to foods (if you’re trying to work out intolerances along the way)
>>Career goals
Examples of projects you’ve been a part of or accomplished
Feedback from clients or internal staff you work with
The hours you’re putting in, especially if you need evidence about how long you’ve been working or how much overtime you’re doing that’s going unnoticed
Extra tasks you’ve taken on above your general duties
>>Parenting goals (say being more present with your children)
You could have a little check box in your planner about whether you read to your kids that night or didn’t yell (or whatever is important to you to do)
Family adventures and how many you want to tick off for the year
Connecting with each child individually
>>Starting a side hustle
How much progress you’re making on building a product for your customers
Your social and business metrics
Your email or marketing list numbers
Eventually your revenue, profit and expenses
>>Savings goals
How much you’ve saved and spent
Your expenses
Where you might be making purchases that are not in line with your goals
The ways I’ve personally been keeping myself accountable and what I track for my goals
I’ve made a weekly habit to check in with myself now because I find this exercise so helpful. I started doing it in about mid-2022 as I was getting frustrated with having goals but no real measurement of how I was going and whether I was making any progress at all.
Now I’m much more likely to check those stats before I worry, and I’ve also been finding it much more useful to know when extra work is needed in a particular area and when I can ease up (plus it stops me complaining to my husband that I’m not getting anywhere!).
>>This is what I like to track each month at the moment:
My exercise habits and consistency
My social and business metrics
Our personal finances
Family trips and where we’ve gone
Course work
All of these things are tied specifically to my goals so there is a valid reason for me to have this type of information and I obviously don’t track things unnecessarily or obsessively either. I only capture the stats that I think are important for me to be aware of, and only when I want to make progress in an area.
Either way, it’s a great exercise to do for yourself.
Hopefully this now gives you the confidence to start looking at how you’re going with your own goals and also some good ideas on how you can see your own progress coming along. Give it a go!
Until next time,
Valli x
If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out the rest of my blog for more helpful topics 😊.
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