Photo by Scramblejam

There are many different aspects involved in setting and keeping goals, and in building positive new habits – one of the most important I think is having some visible way to track your progress.

Our chosen goals and desired changes can often become lost in the myriad demands on our time, and without a consistent system for openly monitoring our day-to-day progress, we are restricting our ability to successfully stick to a our plans.

Whilst there are lots of possibilities for intelligently tracking progress towards an objective – weight charts for the dieters, savings graphs for financially astute – I regularly tackle goals that warrant tracking a daily or few-times-a-week occurrence.

If you’re trying to give up smoking, manage your spending, meditate daily or visit the gym 3 times a week – an invaluable tool to help you establish your habit is a visual tracker that allows you to cross-off/mark/star the days when you have successfully achieved your aim.

Over the last few years, I have experimented with various different systems for monitoring my daily habit changes – Joes Goals is a very popular online system, and is completely free; I’ve also tried the Goal Pro software, which I didn’t get on so well with. My preferred type of tool is a tangible paper-based system – I’ve toyed with the Ben Franklin Hack from Zen Habits and have created more than a few different versions of my own tracker worksheet.

Once I began to play around with these systems, discovering what worked and what sucked – I was able to figure out what my ideal solution was going to do for me, and how it needed to work. Eventually my system evolved into the tracker I use now, every single day, and which I highly recommend.

Daily Habit Tracking with the Compact Calendar Hack

The Compact Calendar is a visual calendar planning system, invented by Dave Seah (a very clever chap). His original idea was to use the Calendar for planning in meetings – enabling users to visually map out blocks of work and to plan resources. I originally downloaded the calendar to do just this, but found I hadn’t really needed to use them as intended – the printed copies I had were hanging around unused.

It was then I realized that the simplicity and elegance of the Compact Calendar layout lent itself wonderfully to a Daily Progress Tracking system – I could mark the days with a sticker, a square, circle or whatever (or some complicated notation system) and I had a huge space on the right to add notes, ideas, mini-mind-maps, feedback and comments where needed.

I started with playing with the system the next day, and found it had everything I needed, and was so simple and easy-to-use that it just worked.

Now, for every new change I am trying to make, or new goal I am trying to reach, I create a Compact Calendar Daily Tracker – I write a motivating title for my goal, write down the important notes and caveats which are relevant to my goal (visit gym for at least 30 minutes, don’t buy chocolate, drink lots of water) and I’m done – My goal is set, the rules are laid out and I have a customized daily tracker where I can mark my progress as I go.

As far as tracking your goals is concerned, it doesn’t get much easier.

Notes and Suggestions

• This tracker system works really well for well-thought-out, objective goals, where you can be damn sure about whether you achieved it or not. I know exactly whether I got up on time or not, or if I ate chocolate or not – make sure the criteria for a successful tick are crystal clear.
• If you’re starting a tracker part-way through the year, you can minimize the negative impact of a big blank unsuccessful space at the start of the year by coloring it in, outlining it or writing over the top of it.
• Don’t be put off by the visual impact of a whole year on one page – if you’re tackling a 30-day challenge or tackling a short-term goal just draw an outline round the designated time period and forget about the rest.
• There are no rules for using this system really – You can write whatever you want on the right, and fill-in the boxes on the left in whatever way floats your boat at the time.
• Get creative! – Use your worksheet as a chance to get really creative and fun. Achieving your goals is supposed to be a challenging, but enjoyable process – make filling in your worksheet enjoyable too! Use bright colours, squares, squiggles, mini-diagrams, sketches of yourself… Whatever works!

Habit Tracker Gallery

Below are some scanned worksheets that I have been working on since the beginning of the year, showing progress towards some of my current goals.

Blank tracker Worksheet	Blogging Worksheet 2008	Exercise Worksheet 2008

I am a huge fan of Flickr, a photo-sharing website owned by Yahoo. Although there are lots of alternatives out there, I find Flickr the most consistently easy to use – combine this with a thriving, creative community and Flickr is clearly a favourite among this type of site.

As well as just sharing your own photo content, I find Flickr to be really useful for discovering fabulous inspirational images on a host of different subjects – hobbies, art, architecture to name a few – I’ve never failed to find an image no matter how bizarre the search terms (though there is some really weird stuff on there).

This post is about finding organizing inspiration via Flickr – and I have had a good browse through the site to find some great examples of organizing mojo, visually documented by the community.

• A Beautiful Bookshelf – Truly a pinnacle of semi-obsessed organizing, this is a very photogenic bookshelf that only true bibliophiles might aspire to. This image has done the rounds of the social network scene, and has become very popular.
• The Pretty Organized Group – Exactly what it says on the tin – A Flickr Group dedicated to showing inspiring exmaples of organizing, in the home, at work, wherever.
• Unclutterer Workspaces – A sideline of the very smart Unclutterer blog, this is a Flickr group for people sharing images of their highly organized workspaces. If you want a tidier desk, you could do wore than to browse this gallery for inspiration.
• Organized Collection – Another organizing group, this time dedicated to collections of things. If you’re a collector of any kind, then this could be a great place to check out for storage ideas.
• What’s in my bag? – This was a very popular Flickr meme for a while, prompting people to photograph and post what they were carrying in their bag on a regular basis. This is full of ideas, interesting and (slightly) voyeuristic – always worth a look!

For those of us who are into productivity techniques, personal workflow systems, GTD, notebooks and note-making, there are even more fabulous links to look through.

• Moleskine Notebooks – I am a huge lover of Moleskine notebooks, and Flickr has some fantastic images of how people organize, store and use their notebooks. See also the Moleskinerie Flickr group.
• Jazzmasterson – Undoubtedly my favourite Flickr user, with some truly jaw-dropping personal management concepts and systems – Getting Things Done with Index Cards and External Memory being the top two.
• The Slip Method – Although this organizing/productivity technique is a little complex compared to systems like GTD, I love browsing through these images for ideas and inspiration on managing my own paper workflow better.
• Time-Management Analogue style – Dave Gray of Xplane has done a wonderful shot of a personal workflow notebook, with a really clever idea for tagging your pages and marking your to-do lists. This idea was originally conceived by Bill Westerman.
• DIYPlanner – A great gallery for planner nerds, with some really clever ideas and suggestions to get more from your ubertool.
• Pile of Index Cards – yes, I love ‘em. If they helped you as much as me, you’d love ‘em too. This is a small but very interestinggroup about the Pile of Index Cards methodology.

If you use Flickr, feel free to add me as a contact – If you come across any organizing images that you think are interesting or noteworthy please forward them on.