745 - Does Tracking Your Goals Help?

Tiny Leaps, Big Changes

Gregg Clunis

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.3 • 920 Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2021

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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In this episode, we ask a question: Does tracking your goals actually help? Get excited, because this is Tiny Leaps, Big Changes.

Welcome to another episode of Tiny Leaps, Big Changes where I share research-backed strategies you can use, to get more out of your life. My name is Gregg Clunis.

The Research:

In 2016, Benjamin Harkin, Thomas L. Webb, Betty Chang, Andrew Prestwich, Mark Conner, Ian Kellar, Yael Benn, and Paschal Sheeran published a study titled “Does Monitoring Goal Progress Promote Goal Attainment? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence”.

The researchers wanted to understand why, “Control theory and other frameworks for understanding self-regulation suggest that monitoring goal progress is a crucial process that intervenes between setting and attaining a goal, and helps to ensure that goals are translated into action. However, the impact of progress monitoring interventions on rates of behavioral performance and goal attainment has yet to be quantified.”

What They Found:

They found, “The present review of 138 interventions designed to promote progress monitoring suggests that (a) it is possible to engender large increases in the frequency of progress monitoring, and (b) increasing progress monitoring engenders a meaningful improvement in rates of behavioral performance and goal attainment. Our conclusion is that progress monitoring has a robust effect on goal attainment and constitutes a key component of effective self regulation”.

Key Takeaways:

We have the choice to take control of this part of our process.
By taking more action, you have a higher chance of achieving the goal.
You have control.
Moving is what is important, not the time it takes.
You can start tracking your progress immediately.
Best methods of tracking include: pen and paper, spreadsheets, or apps.

Sponsored By:

Blinkist: http://blinkist.com/tinyleaps

Try Quince: https://onequince.com | TINY10

Hosted By: Gregg Clunis | https://www.instagram.com/greggclunis/

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Twitter: http://twitter.com/tinyleaps

Website: http://tlbc.co/tiny-leaps-big-changes

Reading: Does Monitoring Goal Progress Promote Goal Attainment? (apa.org)

Transcript

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0:00.0	In this episode we ask a question, does tracking your goals actually help?
0:07.0	Get excited because this is tiny leaves.
0:12.0	Big changes. Welcome to another episode of Tiny Leif's big changes where I share research-backed
0:37.4	strategies you can use to get more out of your life. My name is Greg Clooney. Now we talk about tracking our
0:46.2	actions and our goals all the time. It's like one of the first things that
0:52.4	people reach for when practicing personal development,
0:55.9	when trying to improve themselves, and when trying to accomplish a specific thing, right?
1:01.6	The idea is simple. You want to do X. Does the process of
1:06.5	tracking your activity, tracking your progress, getting closer and closer to this
1:11.6	outcome? Does that actually help?
1:14.6	It's a question that we don't ask very much.
1:16.6	We just sort of take it as fact that it must help, right?
1:20.2	Everyone suggests it.
1:22.0	Every single book you can read, including my own, says that that is the first thing we should do.
1:27.0	I've dedicated hundreds of hours on this podcast, giving you that advice. But many of us have never stopped to ask a
1:36.2	simple question, does it even work? So much of personal development is made up of stuff that just sounds nice to say, stuff that when you hear it, you know, on initial hearing it makes sense, you're like, yeah, I could get behind that. That makes perfect sense.
1:55.0	But it's in the testing that we often figure out the truth of it. So that's what we're going to look at today.
2:01.0	Does the process of tracking our goals actually do anything?
2:06.0	So this should be interesting, but as always, before we jump into it, I want to take a moment
2:11.1	to thank today's sponsors.
2:13.0	Now as you know, our sponsors are the reason we're able to do this podcast.
2:16.9	So if you hear something you like, I highly encourage you to check them out.
	...

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