PROGRESS TRACKING

Last Friday, I spoke at Gem-Mine, a mentorship program for mostly University students aimed at creating better people in mind and in skills. My topic, Progress Tracking was the very first for the year and it was important that this came first so that the students would be able to monitor their own improvements each week as they proceed in the program.

Why Progress Tracking.

There are many reasons why one should track his progress but there are some others that are not so obvious:

1. You can set a faster or easier path for somebody: let’s assume you are learning to write and you set a particular milestone for yourself. Consciously monitoring how that goal was achieved, the problems on the way, mistakes you made, and things you could have done better would mean you can become a good mentor for somebody in the future. You would be able to use your experiences to guide someone else to achieve that same goal in an easier, faster, and most importantly structured way.
2. To check for improvements and deterioration: while the former is probably obvious, the latter might not be. Improvements are surely what we want to be monitoring when working towards a particular goal but the flip side should also be measured. It brings the question, how can one be deteriorating while working towards a goal? Well, let's say you bake cakes and got an order to bake an 8-inch cake. let us assume that it would normally take you 2 hours to do this but this time, it took you 3 hours. Not sitting down to audit the whole process and time it took you would mean you would miss the fact that you have just spent 50% extra time on baking an eight-inch cake and you might even miss the factors that led you to this. It is advisable, even in small to always check for Progress, to see if you are actually getting better at what you are doing.
3. To Optimize your processes: continuing from the example above, tracking your progress on a goal can help you spot loopholes in your processes and help you find processes that can be crashed and others that might lead you to your goal faster if they are run in parallel.
4. To re-enforce your knowledge: This can easily be explained for knowledge-based Tasks. let’s assume your goal is to understand a specific topic, you must have read and reviewed it several times but going back to check how much progress you’ve made is adding one extra and careful revision which will test your understanding of what you’ve been absording.

Steps to Track your progress

If you are going to learn without actually acting with what you’ve learnt, you might just be wasting your time.

1. Write down your goals. In tracking progress, the first thing you want to do is write down your goals. After all, what you are tracking is progress towards a particular goal. I cannot overemphasize the importance of putting pen to paper especially when it comes to goals. Apart from making your goals actually feel real and the feeling of commitment that comes with that, goal setting for a day automatically gives that day a purpose. It also helps you question all the activities you will be performing that day to determine whether they will lead you to that desired goal. If you have to practice a dance routine between 12 and 1 pm and you find yourself lost between Whatsapp statuses, you are probably not going to learn that routine.

It is also important that your goals are not the items on your to-do list. They are specific things that will give you a sense of achievement if completed by the end of the day.

2. Get the Tools you will need: Progress Tracking requires tools. The tools vary according to the type of Goal you want to achieve. Examples of Tools can be are a Personal Journal (or Goal Book) for writing down your goals and commenting on them, a Medium page especially if you are a writer, a Portfolio of your works (Git, Behance, etc), and finally, a Friend; this can be an actual Friend, a Mentor or a Family Member but the idea here is to get someone you can report to who can access and attest to your improvement periodically through sincere feedbacks.

3. Do mindful work: You might want to read a Summary of Deep Work by Cal Newport or perhaps the whole book. You may not agree with the feasibility of all the ideas in the book, many of which have been proven to work but you will surely agree with the difficulty of doing mindful work in our world t. I can bring all this to the quote below:

Make sure you are actually working while you are working and playing while you are playing.

Playing or allowing distractions while working makes it difficult to access how much time and effort you are actually putting into your work. So you might not be able to make close-to accurate decisions while tracking your progress.

4. Re-access your Goals: To reassess my goals, I ask myself the following questions:

a. Did I achieve my Goals? : This question is quite tricky but I answer it easily without excuses by comparing my achievement rate to my standards. Student A might want to have a score of at least 40 in an examination while student B wants nothing less than a 70. Even though a score of 50 is a pass-mark by the school’s standards, having a score of 50 is a goal achieved for Student A and a failed goal for Student B.

b. Did I follow the processes written down? If no, what changed? (This is important so that you can optimize your processes if need be)

c. What did I learn?

d. Am I better than I was when I wrote down this goal? (Well, this is the most crucial question). You are making progress if you are better than you were during your last check and if this improvement will lead you to your final goal.