Achieving your goal begins with the awareness of the outcome, change or improvement you seek, and setting a clear and specific goal to help you attain it.  Once that’s done, you must then decide the steps you must take to get there, and finally make sure you take steps to move you closer to that goal every day (see Achieving Personal Goals). This page explains how tracking data that shows our activity toward the things we are interested in changing can produce improvements in our performance and provide more motivation to achieve our goals.

Last year, Veronica Noone went for a regular run with a small sensor attached to her running shoes.  The sensor recorded and stored information about her run, including how the distance and how long the run took.  This information was saved in her iPod for later review. I first heard about this technology recently in a story in Wired magazine, but I was struck less with fascination with the technology and more with the impact it had on her behavior, motivation and activity levels.

Having access to this kind of information about the activity appears to encourage most people and leads them to want to do it again.  According to Veronica, “It just made running so much more entertaining for me.  There’s something about seeing what you’ve done, how your pace changes as you go up and down hills, that made me more motivated”.  The outcome is that it’s led to modification in her behavior, to the point that she is running frequently weekly now and has started entering races.  She attributes much of her present fitness and to the power of having that data from each run.

The benefits of measuring our progress at whatever we are doing, and specifically when we have set a goal, is that it gives us clear feedback which motivates us, and it shows trends that we might not otherwise detect.  Our nature is to tend to want to improve, to move in the general direction of our goal.  When we are not able to clearly view the results of our performance, we lose the chance to get the emotional lift that comes from making progress.  To spin a familiar phrase, “what you don’t know won’t kill you, but it will diminish the motivational opportunity that knowing our results provides”.

The statistics on this technology has revealed another interesting fact.   It appears that things change once someone uses the system 5 times.  Once users hit five ‘uses’, i.e. 5 times having recorded their data, they’re much more likely to keep running and uploading their data.  At the five run mark, users become hooked on what the data (feedback) reveals about themselves.  If we are interested in the performance, isn’t it possible, or even likely, a similar pattern would emerge if we were tracking weight loss, reducing debt or increasing fitness?  The lesson: Stick to the plan you set to achieve your goal, and record your results at least 5 times, and you will significantly improve your chances for success.

Another interesting effect has been observed.   Users examining the results of their runs produce what sociologists call the Hawthorne effect.  The principle in the Hawthorne effect says that we will change our behavior for the better if we know we are being watched .  You may be thinking to yourself that this sounds like accountability, and you would be right.  By reviewing the feedback provided by the system, you essentially become an observer as well as a participant, and the behavior modifications identified by the Hawthorne effect still apply.  Record your results, review them, and the sense of accountability kicks in and you essentially get the benefit of improved performance.

In another example of this principle, it’s been shown over and over that those people who diligently count their calories when trying to lose weight do better than those who don’t count calories.  Sound familiar?  When you examine your behavior and have a clear understanding of what it has been, you become an observer.  Another company, Core Performance, realized that workouts in which metrics are recorded (sets, reps, weight lifted, etc) make you fitter, because you will workout more precisely and put in more effort if it’s clear you’re going to be seeing your results.  Once again, you become your observer and without realizing it hold yourself accountable.  It’s similar to not being observed when you fail to track and record your results.  Mason Goldbert, co-owner of a fitness club, says “People love to track things.  It brings out their competitive spirit.”

Whatever your objective, it must contain the elements of the acronym SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time Sensitive).  Don’t forget the Measurable piece - it’s one key to motivation and consistency.

The run Veronica took that day was just over 1.5 miles, and took a little more than 18 minutes.  It’s effects, though, go even beyond that run.  It provided the results from the day’s run, and more importantly it set a baseline against which she could measure future performance.  Since that first run until the time the story was published, Veronica had run 95 more times, logging 283 miles in about 48 hours.  More importantly, her weight went from a high of 225 lbs to 145 lbs.

What we measure over time will improve. 

For more information on this and other topics related to making improvements in your life, go to Achieving Personal Goals.