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Frequently Monitoring Progress Toward Goals Increases Chance of Success (apa.org)
89 points by Oatseller on Nov 2, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



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.


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


Link to study abstract and pdf download: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/87431/


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.


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.


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


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


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.)


Yes, it works but directed by yourself and with yourself.

As an independent contractor working on usually large contracts, I can generate for each of my project a "workload", that is, the numbers of hours I need to work in a period and it produces a nice graph[0] with the target and the reality. The real work is pulled directly out of my work logs[1].

Since doing this, it helped me a lot managing long term developments.

[0]: http://imgur.com/cXlzsn9

[1]: https://projecthamster.wordpress.com/screenshots/


Not so much. What is important is that you have a concrete metric for success, and that the metric be rapidly responsive to work input. This has two effects:

1.) You can see what is, and is not effective work. Thus you are more likely to engage in time-efficient work behaviours.

2.) You get a sense of accomplishment from progress according to the metric. This makes work performed more rewarding, thus increasing motivation.

In my experience, if you just log/report work done without having a trackable progress metric the benefits aren't nearly so significant.


Unless counteracted by the effect of interruptions: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html




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