Setting goals are important. However, measuring the progress you are making against your goals is the actual ingredient that keeps me reminding my goals. It makes me work on them as I can quantify my actions taken against a goal.
One of my goals is to finish a set of courses. In my mind, I have assigned a high priority to them. However, after looking at my weekly rhythm register (a spreadsheet where I track my weekly activities), I can see that I have worked on it for 2 of the last twelve days. This single insight has given me a rude shock and made me rethink my priorities.
In my mind, finishing those courses were a very high priority for me as the additional skill I will gain by completing these have a profound impact on my career. My actions tell me otherwise. I would have never noticed this if I had not been tracking my activities over the last two weeks.
Compare this with what I have been doing. I have been playing chess regularly over the last two weeks. I guess they are more important to me than doing better at my job. However, that’s not true. I really want to do well in my job. It is only now that I have been measuring and tracking my activities over the last couple of weeks, I can truly understand where my time, energy and attention has been.
The idea of a weekly rhythm register comes from the book “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy. Break your goals into activities and then track your action against those activities. This will give you amazing insights. Open Google Sheets or MS Excel and track your activities. You can create a sheet as shown below:
