Keep a Journal for Progress

Journaling is a fantastic tool to track your progress.  How you journal is highly personal.  Here are some common journaling methods: 

1.  Track your day with details

Many people don’t enjoy journaling their thoughts and feelings.  If this is you, consider journaling the details of your goal instead.  For example, you can track the following information:
 

• What did you eat?  
• How long did you work out?
• On a scale of 1-10, how did you feel during your workout? 

You can use a spreadsheet to track the information, a calendar, pda, or even email the information to yourself.  Each daily entry will be a reply to your original email until you have 30 messages at the end of the month.  Or if you’re tracking what you ate, you may have several entries for each day.  You can also track the information in a notebook.

2.  Dear Diary

While many do not like to journal thoughts and feelings, there are just as many people who do enjoy expressing themselves with words.  Journaling how you feel each day, what struggles you had and how you overcame them or succumbed to them can be incredibly cathartic and satisfying. Journaling your successes can be empowering too. 

When you go back and read your successes, you can feel and remember your strength and it can motivate you to continue on.  It can motivate you to set higher goals for yourself and to achieve them. 

3.  Daily goal

Setting small goals will help you attain bigger ones.  Having a daily goal, and recording it, is an excellent way to measure success.  It can also help you stay positive when you look back on your daily to do list and realize that yet again you’ve accomplished your goals.  A daily goal added to your to do list can keep you on track toward your end goal.  For example, if your end goal is to reach a target weight, your daily goal might be to eat three well balanced meals and take the dog for a walk.  It’s easier to reach your goals when they’re written down and you can check them off as you go.

4.  Online tools

If a journal, spreadsheet or to do list aren’t fitting your personality or lifestyle, what about an online tool?  There are many programs you can add that help you document and track your success.  For example, the FitWatch Fitness Tracker allows you to track your fitness results and document how you felt while you were working out.