Designed to help you to set, visualise and achieve your goals.
What is it about trackers that make them so much fun?!
Here is why I can't get enough of habit/progress trackers:
- They act as a visual reminder.
- Encourages to stay focussed and work towards set goals.
- They create a sense of satisfaction, seeing those ticks and progress is a sure way to motivate you to continue the streak.
- You can be as creative as you want with them (even if by adding a pop of colour with highlighters and stickers).
I love them so much, for the 2021 planners I designed a mother of all trackers, - an annual Progress Tracker!
If you are familiar with the CEO of My Own Life® planners, you will already know they have monthly trackers present. They are called Habits Trackers, - where you can track the progress of your habits/goals/activities every day. Despite the name they can be used in various ways, get some tips and inspiration from our earlier blog post 44 Ideas for Your Habits Tracker.
So why add another tracker? Well, think of this one as a MASTER tracker.
The overall goal of the Progress Tracker is to allow you to see/monitor the progress of a certain activity or a goal over an entire year.
It is not split into our four core sections (business & career, home & family, health & fitness, personal) as the rest of the planner intentionally, - to give you more flexibility. But you can categorise your activities/goals in the first column of the tracker.
And in this post I would like to share with you three different ways to use it, depending on your planning style and circumstances.
1. Plan/visualise long term projects
If you are embarking on a long term project (or two), the Progress Tracker can help you to visualise what and when needs to be done.
This could be very helpful if you have multiple long term projects on the go, just by looking at a particular month’s column you can see what needs to be done that month for all your projects. Detailed/more specific versions of those goals/activities (basically turning them into actionable to-dos) can be then transferred to a relevant Monthly Master Plan.
Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of how this would work in practice:
Category: Home & Family
Planning a wedding: (for a minute, let’s pretend Covid does not exist …)
- Pick a venue: Feb- Choose a colour palette: Feb
- Decide on a guest list: Feb
- Send out the invitations: Mar
- Start working on a seating plan: Apr
- And so on...
Or let’s say you are planning to renovate the kitchen:
- Research trends and pick colours (hello Pinterest!): Jan- Get quotes from builders and agree on a contract: Feb
- Work starts and completes: March - April
- Start baking! - May
Category: Business & Career
Launching a new product:
- Design: Jan - Feb- Manufacture samples: Mar
- Testing/feedback: Apr
- Adjustments and mass production: May- Jun
- Go live: Jul
Other ideas:
- Setting up a new business- New website development
- Coursework progress
- Etc.
2. Track progress of specific goals
The above method allows you to visualise and understand what and when needs to be done to achieve your long term goals/plans. But you can also use the Progress Tracker to monitor the progress of specific (individual) goals, just like in the daily trackers but on a monthly basis.
Here are some examples under a couple of categories:
Category: Business & Career
- Acquire x number of new clients each month- Increase sales by x %
- Etc.
Category: Health & Fitness
- Monthly training goals (running, weight training, tracking PBs (personal bests) etc.)- Diet, weight, measurements goals
- Other specific monthly goals: (no alcohol, no takeaways etc.)
- Etc.
Category: Personal
- Progress of personal hobbies (i.e. learning a new language)
- Monthly goal to read a certain number of books
- No spending months
- Etc.
3. Record stats and use it as a reminder tool
Another way to use this Progress Tracker is to record stats and/or use it as a reminder tool, for example:
Recording monthly stats:
- Staff overtime and annual leave- Social media stats
- Money in the bank
- Kids learning progress
- Etc.
As a reminder tool:
- VAT/tax bills due- Gardening timeline (when to sow/transplant etc.)
- Cleaning routine
- Data back up
- Etc.
I hope this will be enough to get you started. Give it a go and let me know how you get on. No doubt you will come up with other fabulous ideas, so do leave your tips and tricks in the comments section below for others to enjoy and adapt to their lives.
Happy planning!