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In my last post I talked a bit about why we need to measure our progress toward our goals and gave a simple example of doing so. Let’s examine this topic just a bit more.

I titled these posts “Measuring Goals” but that’s really not quite accurate. We are measuring our progress. Now, we can’t measure our progress if we haven’t established a plan for achieving the goal, identified specific actions we would take (maybe repeatedly), and figured out what specific results we expect those actions to produce. We need to have a plan that we have confidence in, we need to believe it will work. Once we’ve done that, we are really going to measure our execution of the plan from time to time.

In my previous post we were driving to Dallas from Austin, Texas. We had six hours. Let’s assume that we planned to drive about 60 miles an hour. This would get us to Dallas on time. Then, we stopped a few times and when we measured our progress (in Waco, remember?) we decided that we needed to make an adjustment.

We didn’t adjust our goal, we adjusted our action plan. We had a plan we had confidence in but once we reached Waco we were behind schedule. Our plan had been good, but we hadn’t executed it as well as we should have. So, we adjusted our plan and started taking measurements more frequently as we continued our drive.

This is how you measure your progress in reaching your goals too. Set your goals, establish your plan, take some measurements, and (if needed) adjust your plan and/or your execution of the plan.

If you do this regularly you will greatly increase your probability of achieving your goal!

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