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

In following the path of Success Mastery, there are a lot of things which can trip us up. The original post highlighted how social conditioning warps our perception of success – another thing which can cause a lot of unnecessary worry and excessive work is perfectionism.

Perfectionism – A propensity for being displeased with anything that is not perfect or does not meet extremely high standards.

I’m sure there are many fields where perfectionism, or the striving for perfection is a positive focus – Two good friends of mine are both top photographers, and I consider them to be evangelists of perfection – they are willing to spend huge amounts of time, money, creativity and effort in pursuit of that perfect image – and judging from their work, it pays off. Photography is a creative discipline, and in any creative business where the end result has to be exact, a certain measure of perfectionism is expected (or you might not get another job).

In the majority of work and home life though, a desire for perfection hampers more than it helps – your “perfect” home gets sullied by your slightly untidy friends, so you don’t invite them round (and miss out on their company); your “perfect” report took a day longer than needed (your boss wonders what else you should have been doing); your search for the “perfect” partner leaves you lonely on Valentines Day (your sisters handsome-ish boyfriend gave her a diamond).

Striving for perfection can suck a lot of the joy out of life, and wastes time that could be better spent on other things. Perfectionism seems a worthy ideal on the surface, but it is an insidious influence – one quite often working on us subconsciously, and almost always to our detriment.

Some time ago, whilst pursuing various aspects of personal growth, I began to realize my own drive for perfectionism in several areas of my life – As I began to deepen my understanding of how it negatively affected me, I wanted to find a simple way to combat this aberrant behaviour, and found it in the solution I now want to share with you.

Identify your Perfection Triggers

The first step in beating this tendency is in starting to become aware of the psychological and environmental factors which trigger your perfectionism. This won’t happen overnight, but once you can begin to spot when your desire for perfection is being triggered, you can activate the next step outlined below.

Possible perfectionism triggers:

• Work projects for valuable clients
• Anything related to a possible appraisal or pay review
• Housework or home improvements for a picky partner
• Buying a gift for someone
• Thinking “That’s not good enough for me!”
• Thinking “They are not good enough for me!”

There are a huge range of perfectionism triggers, and we will all have different ones derived from what we individually consider important – Perfectionism triggers are a uniquely personal thing, even though there are many that are common and more socially prevalent.

When you scratch beneath the surface of these possibilities, it becomes clear that they all have a common foundation – that we have been conditioned in some way to see the potential outcome or result of this effort as directly impacting upon to our sense of self-worth.

What this means is that we often strive for perfectionism on projects or areas of our life which we deem as important for our sense of self-worth, i.e. how we perceive ourselves, or how we are perceived by others. Perfectionism then is a tool or belief used to protect us from the negative consequences of a particular course of action, when those consequences will have a negative impact upon us.

Once you start becoming consciously aware of what triggers your perfectionism urges, you are in a position to be able to act upon them. You can decide differently. You can work out what the best course of action is, and carry it out. You can bypass perfectionism, and concentrate on production.

Go Ugly Early!

I came across this term via my friend Geoff, and its origin was as a simple rule for, err, increasing one’s chances of “friendly” company when one is out on the town (you’re an adult, I’m sure you can figure it out).

Despite the charm (or lack thereof) of this phrase, it is an easy rule to remember, and works to combat the desire for perfectionism. If I know I am fiddling with the details of something, rather than simply finishing it off… I say this to myself (smile) and crack on with getting it out of the door.

“Go Ugly Early” isn’t the most politically-correct phrase (it works for me though, and reminds me not to take things too seriously), so a more socially-acceptable alternative might be:

A good result today is better than a perfect result tomorrow…

What’s important about these phrases is not the particular words they use, but the image or internal representation they conjure up. It should instantly trigger a more positive feeling that whatever was driving you towards perfectionism – it should help you move yourself away from focusing on your desired “perfect” end result, and back towards something which is equally acceptable but is suitable and usable now.

These phrases are geared towards a practical strategy for handling a perfectionist tendency, but more importantly the key thing to do to is to consciously remind ourselves that our self-worth is not at stake as much as we believe, and that it is ok to be human and imperfect.

Perfectionism can be a blight on our daily lives. Through being more aware of how we judge our self-worth by what we do and by keeping an eye out for our perfection triggers – we can spot where we are putting ourselves under pressure to be perfect. From there it is a simple step to redirect our energy into a less perfect, but more suitable outcome.