
Frequently Monitoring Progress Toward Goals Increases Chance of Success - Oatseller
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/10/progress-goals.aspx
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mmastrac
You don't need be meeting daily to succeed -- just keep yourself a "public"
log (well, public to the team at least) and write down everything in that log:
TODOs, questions, ideas, etc.

Monitor your own progress and success and make it available to anyone to read.

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arafalov
Looks like gamification to me. Including the fact that what they measure (and
effectively gamify) is what the person focuses on changing.

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Oatseller
Link to study abstract and pdf download:
[http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/87431/](http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/87431/)

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novalis78
That was key in Raymond Hulls' classic (and European bestseller) 'How to get
what you want'. Repeated hand-written refocusing exercises on your key goals.

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pbnjay
Sweet, I'm building an app that sorta does this as a side effect. The idea for
that app wasn't so scientifically based, but this is some pretty cool
supporting information.

I think there's still a lot of opportunity left around making personal
progress monitoring more effective.

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bluenose69
$p$ values -- it must be true. Oh, wait a second
[[http://www.nature.com/news/psychology-journal-bans-p-
values-...](http://www.nature.com/news/psychology-journal-bans-p-
values-1.17001)]

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aswanson
So...micromanagement and frequent status meetings work. Ugh.

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dragonwriter
No, frequently _monitoring_ of progress is not micromanagement, and isn't
status meetings either. The former is direction on _how_ to make progress, the
latter is, at best, _sharing_ information about progress, not monitoring
progress (if its used for top-down monitoring by a lead and not sharing among
a team for coordination, it means most of the people are idle most of the
meeting, and it probably should just be passive updates to the lead or, if
meeting is necessary, one-on-ones with each staff to minimize the time people
are unproductively idle.)

What this article is about is something else; individuals monitoring their own
progress. Generalizing to groups, and addressing specific _methods_ of
monitoring progress in groups, is outside the scope of this research (though I
suppose your comment is a perfect illustration of the way that incompetent
managers are likely to misapply this kind of research to support
counterproductive practices.)

