A lot of confident people voice out their respective New Year’s resolutions every start of the calendar year. While some stay true to their paths, a majority of them quit or forget about their targets. Everyone seems excited to start the New Year with big ambitions, but not all of them make it a reality. It’s essential not to let yourself be one of those people. Tracking goals can help.

Goals, however, are only the results of your efforts. The real reason why people set goals is that they want to find out if they can make any progress in life. While it’s natural for people to be happy once they accomplish their goals, the process is what makes it a meaningful quest. You may even feel empty after achieving a goal if you do not remember how much progress you’ve made from your starting point.

How Tracking Progress Helps You Accomplish Goals

Tracking your progress and getting your goals are two completely different things, but both scenarios contribute to a better you. When setting a goal, you must keep track of the progress leading to your achievement. Failure to track your progress can hinder your accomplishment because you don’t know if you’re on the right path or if you’re making any progress at all.

It does not matter if you, a goal-oriented person, want to set a goal for your career, diet, lifestyle, body, or financial plans. What should matter to you is that you want to make progress, regardless of whether or not you can reach your goal.

Here are some of the benefits that keeping track of your progress can do for your goal-reaching life:

1. Staying Focused on the Endgame

All successful paths to achieving goals require focus from your end. When engaging in a healthy diet for a weight loss target, it’s easy for your favorite greasy double patty burger to distract you.

When you’re trying to stay in shape by doing hard and constant exercise in the gym, it’s easy for a short cigarette break at the office to take away your focus. The same goes with your financial goals when you happen to find your favorite piece of clothing on sale at the mall. There are a lot of unexpected distractions that can bump you off your road to achieving your goal, but keeping track of your progress helps you stay focused.

There are also people who fail to accomplish their goals not because they don’t have the skill to do so but because they lose sight of the prize. When you take note of your improvement every day, it serves as a daily reminder that you want to succeed on something. You can take note of how many pushups you completed for the day and aim for double the number tomorrow to get in better shape. Tracking progress helps you sharpen your focus and lets you know how far you’ve come from the day you set your mind on a goal.

2. Keeping an Optimistic Mindset

If you don’t learn how to keep track of your progress on goals, it makes you more likely to look at the days when you failed. While it’s a natural behavior for people to focus on a disappointing development, it does not mean that you should not consider how much you’ve accomplished especially when the successful days outnumber the moment of failures. Everyone in a journey toward a goal will experience struggles, issues, and difficulties at some point. Those problems will become glaring, however, when you failed to note down your progress.

Keeping track of your improvement helps prevent you from taking time off to sulk in your failures. The many accomplishments you achieved will help keep your spirits up, which is essential in trying to get to your goals. When a disaster at home or an illness in need of medical attention derail you from a financial savings goal, you can pick yourself up knowing that you can start saving again once you’re finished dealing with the problem.

3. Learning How to Break Down a Long-Term Goal

The most common problem of people that fail to achieve their goals is that they find their dreams too big that it makes them almost impossible to accomplish. When you feel that your target is overwhelming, tracking your progress is the best solution. No one can achieve success overnight. However, keeping track of progress helps you break down a massive dream into small steps. Creating small-term goals to fit your long-term endgame will make you realize that no task is unachievable, giving you the confidence and the willpower to finish them.

A long-term goal, such as running a full marathon, for example, can be difficult when you consider the time you need to invest in it. Keeping track of your progress helps you develop a no-quit mentality in the process.

4. Deciphering a Quicker Path

There are no similar paths on the road to achieving a goal for two different people. It’s crucial for you, the goal-oriented person, to understand that because you cannot just copy another person’s method and hope that it will go the same way for you. Keep track of your progress to find out what you need to do to find the quickest method to accomplish your goal in your way. In the next weeks or months, you may notice that there is a technique for you that provides better results than other methods. Taking note of your improvement will help you stay efficient and organized. You can determine what activities you need to do more and what tasks you can take a break from when you keep track of your progress.

It also helps you determine your priorities when trying to achieve a goal. You can dedicate more time to what you need to improve on more than those you already have the necessary skills to do regularly, which maximizes your productivity.

5. Making Progress a Habit

Everyone celebrates when they achieve a goal. However, you’re more likely to lose grip on the thing you dedicated your time and effort to when you don’t keep your focus on maintaining the target you achieved. A simple checklist and a tracking sheet will go a long way for your success, but it’s essential for you to keep making progress.

Keeping track of your progress in trying to achieve your goal will help you reach that target faster, but it also allows you to acknowledge how much mental and physical effort it took for you to get to that point. Refusing to monitor your progress may lead you to think that the success came overnight, risking the chances that you might lose it as fast as you thought you got it.

You need to aim for bigger dreams and broader ambitions to keep yourself engaged. When progress becomes a habit, it makes you challenge yourself to reach your limitations or realize that you don’t have any.