How do you set specific, achievable goals and track your progress?

[mayorRP]

Setting specific, achievable goals and tracking progress is key to making progress towards your objectives. Here are some steps you can follow:

Define your goal: Clearly define what you want to achieve. Be specific about what you want to accomplish and set a deadline for when you want to achieve it.
Break it down into smaller steps: Identify the smaller steps or milestones you need to accomplish in order to achieve your goal. This will help you to track your progress and stay motivated.
Make it achievable: Make sure that your goal is realistic and achievable within the given time frame. This will help you to stay focused and motivated.
Write it down: Write down your goal and the smaller steps you need to take to achieve it. This will help you to stay focused and track your progress.
Measure your progress: Set up a system for tracking your progress. This could be a simple spreadsheet or a more sophisticated project management tool. Use this system to regularly assess your progress and adjust your approach if necessary.
Celebrate your achievements: Celebrate each milestone you reach and use these successes to motivate you to keep going.
Remember that setting goals and tracking progress is an ongoing process. Regularly reassess your goals and adjust your approach as needed to stay on track. With time and effort, you can achieve your objectives and make progress towards your dreams.

[CoffeeMan]

I am currently reading ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. The author has a different take on this. I’ll try my best to summarise here.

Forget about goals, focus on systems instead.
Goals are about the results we want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. It is said in the book that results have very little to do with the goals we set and nearly everything to do with the systems we follow.

The author goes on to enumerate a few problems that arise when we spend too much time thinking about our goals and not enough time designing our systems. I’ll elaborate on each one while trying to keep my post as short as realistically possible.

• Winners and losers have the same goals.
  We concentrate on the people who end up winning and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
  Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.

• Achieving a goal is only a momentary change
  Suppose you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room… for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without treating the cause.
  When you solve problems at the result level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level.

• Goals restrict your happiness
  The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.
  It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success.

• Goals are at odds with long-term progress
  When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it?
  The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

[The_integrous_one]

@CoffeeMan

True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.

Niceee .
But bro I differ in one opinion here, How can systems be created when you have no goal in mind?
As you mentioned “endless refinememt and continuous improvement” this itself is a type of goal. eg. my goal is to improve myself everyday.
This is not a clear goal though, what you want to improve yourself in? Physique, mental health etc anything can be the answer here and each kind of answer will have a a specific habit you need to build to acheive it.
Hence in my opinion goals and systems are directly related, you have a particular goal in your mind and according to it you set your systems.
That would be best.
Like recently I had in mind that yeah I need to improve but I am not thinking clearly what I need to improve in, unless I set particular target areas of improvement (goals) in my mind I can’t create systems fo improvement. Get it? What’s your take on this.