If you often feel that you’re spinning your wheels to success and not progressing as fast or as well as you should, it may be time to evaluate the efforts you’ve made toward your goals. For that, you must collect data.
Measuring your efforts of success must include evaluation of your life in areas you want to succeed. Perhaps you want to lose weight, improve your financial situation or your health. How much progress are you making – and how much more will have to happen to reach success?
Collecting data about losing weight is easy. You can simply look at the weight you’ve lost during a certain period of time and realize if you need to turn up the heat or that you’re on the right track and can continue as planned.
It may be a bit more difficult to collect data and analyze your efforts of setting and reaching some goals. It depends on whether you’ve kept accurate records of your progress and can pinpoint how much effort you made to get where you are now.
Taking stock of where you’ve been and where you are now should be done on a regular basis. This monitoring progress can help you learn valuable lessons as you go about what may be holding you back and where you can make positive changes.
Carefully kept records of achievements and setbacks will be useful when you’re ready to set more goals for the future. You’ll know what works and what doesn’t and be able to make more informed decisions about your future.
Certain areas to measure that could give you valuable feedback include productivity. If you’re not already aware of how you’re spending your time, begin to keep a log of how much time you spend on work, distractions, phone calls, checking emails and other areas – both good and bad.
What you monitor depends on what your goals are. For example, if you’re attempting to build an online following, monitor how many followers you’ve gained in a certain amount of time. Also, check out how the followers connect with you. Do they respond to your emails or blog posts?
You can monitor your progress in days, weeks, months or years and use that information to plot the next time frame. Through the evaluation process you’ll learn how effective you’ve been in meeting goals, learn new ways to progress faster and more effectively and become smarter about future action plans.
After data is gathered, notes are made and analysis performed, be sure and check the outcome with your future goals and objectives. Determine how you’re going to use the valuable information of your conclusions and then use that information to increase your productivity.
