Many people log the details of their days on to-do lists to stay on track and organized. But are you tracking the bigger picture as you work toward professional or personal goals? By recording your goals and monitoring them, you actually increase your chance of success.
Keep reading to discover the role goal trackers can play in your personal success or the success of business teams. We’ll also share some tools and templates you can use with monday.com’s Work OS to help you better track, manage, and meet all of your goals.
What are goal trackers?
Goal trackers are documents that measure your goal progress against the benchmarks you set.
You can track goals on paper, such as in a bullet journal spread. Or you can create digital goal trackers using programs like Google docs or mobile apps. With monday.com’s Work OS, you can create goal tracking templates that automatically sync with other templates to ensure multiple people or teams can see progress toward goals — more on this later.
Your goal tracker should capture the information that’s most relevant for you or your team’s success. Some common components of goal trackers include:
- Milestones or checkpoints to be checked off once completed
- Daily checkboxes or fields for tracking habits or daily results
- Charts that can be color-coded or completed as you obtain results
Choose or build a goal tracker that is easy to complete so you will be more likely to use it.
Using goal or habit trackers can be fun and rewarding. But before you start spending your time designing a new tracker or learn about how monday.com supports goal management, let’s look at some more benefits related to tracking goals.
Why use goal trackers?
Goal tracking lets you visualize your progress and success in detail as you work toward it. It also forces you to record information about your goals on a regular basis and own up to potential bad habits that might be keeping you from success. That activity supports some powerful benefits. According to one study, individuals who take time to vividly describe their goals are up to 1.4 times more likely to achieve them.
Tracking goals also pushes you to have a clear purpose that guides your efforts. A clear purpose, combined with routine updates on your goal tracker keeps you focused on the efforts that will help you reach your goals faster. In a team or business environment, goal tracking can increase productivity and motivate employees. This is especially true if you tie rewards to success and use trackers to measure progress toward individual and team goals.
Recording progress toward goals can also impact success with future goals — with a clear record, it’s easy to go back and review goal tracker data to identify slow periods and bottlenecks or challenges that helped or prevented teams from reaching a goal. Using that information helps you tweak future efforts and goals appropriately or solve for pain points.
Now that you know the benefits of goal tracking, you may be ready to get started. We’ve summarized some types of goal trackers below. Check them out to get more ideas for tracking business or personal goals.
What are some types of goal trackers?
The great thing about goal trackers is that you can create and use them for almost anything. Want to learn to play the guitar? Create a goal tracker and check off every chord you master. Need your team to enter 100,000 data points by the end of month? Create a goal tracker to let people update how many they complete each day so they know whether their numbers are good or bad and where they can improve.
Some overarching categories of goal trackers include:
- Business goal trackers: These tools record progress toward specific organizational objectives such as meeting an enterprise sales goal, opening a new storefront, or going public with an IPO.
- Team goal trackers: You can set team goals so everyone can see how the department or group is doing as a whole.
- Employee goal trackers: Employee goal trackers keep you and your team updated on progress and can be invaluable during evaluations or coaching sessions.
- Individual professional goal trackers: Setting up your own professional goal tracker is an excellent way to know exactly where you stand or keep track of milestones and positive movement in your career. It also can be a useful tool for discussing your performance with management.
- Personal goal trackers: Track progress toward personal goals related to fitness, learning, or finance. Goal trackers are a great solution to keep you motivated when you’re tackling a huge personal project because you can see the gains you’re making with each step.
You can build each of these types of goal trackers with monday.com Work OS. How else does monday.com support goal tracking? Let’s take a look at other features and what customizations you can take advantage of.
monday.com Work OS goal tracking features
We know how important goal setting and tracking are to success, which is why it’s a central capability of monday.com Work OS features. You can also choose from 200+ templates in our Template Center and adapt them to manage business or personal goals, including setting options for daily reminders.
Centralize all of your key data and transform it into a meaningful dashboard with the Goal Widget.
This resource makes it easy to see progress at a high level via habit tracking visuals like pie charts.
monday.com templates for goal tracking
As we mentioned, we have 200+ templates to choose from. Here are some of our favorites for goal trackers:
- Quarterly objectives: Track efforts on goals that take a while to achieve or set and manage quarterly goals to improve your business. Setting goals on the Quarterly Objectives Template also lets you break up annual big-picture objectives into more achievable milestones.
- OKR template: Businesses that use OKR structures to define and manage goals can dive right into the process with the OKR Template. The popular Objectives and Key Results method lets teams collaborate to set — and achieve — ambitious goals for each quarter and throughout the year.
- Monthly budget template: Manage financial goals with tools like the Monthly Budget Template. This tracker is designed for personal money management, but you can create options for tracking finances related to small businesses, operational departments, or specific projects.
monday.com Work OS is built from the ground up with comprehensive tools and key features to help individuals or teams think about objectives and set goals that matter. Let’s dig into a few of those resources below.
monday.com goal tracking templates
Goals template
Setting good goals and habits builds a foundation for success. But identifying the right goals and formatting them in a way that supports success can be challenging at times. Our Quarterly Objectives Template helps you get started with easy-to-complete fields and prompts that pave the way to solid, measurable goals. And if the basic template doesn’t have everything you want when setting goals, it’s easy to customize the template to fit your preferences or workflow.
Monthly goals template
Goal setting should always occur on specific scales and timelines, such as days, weeks, or months. Paying attention to the scale you’re working in helps you understand what’s realistic. For example, if you wanted to write a novel, that might be a goal on an annual scale. Increase success with that bigger goal by breaking it up into smaller chunks, such as writing a few chapters a month. Whether you’re looking at milestones for a larger goal or a project that can be done in 30 days, our Monthly Goals Template is a great place to start.
Frequently asked questions about goal tracking
What is the best way to track your goals?
The best way to track your goals will depend on your personal or business needs. If you hate using a particular goal tracker structure or it takes too much time to complete, you’re less likely to use it consistently. The same is true for tools in a business environment. If you — or your teams — aren’t using a goal tracker consistently, it doesn’t serve its purpose. You can also ask for help from a personal coach or accountability partner to keep you consistent in tracking and working toward your goals.
How do you set goals?
Start by aligning goals with personal or business purposes and priorities. Then, use a method such as SMART goal setting to create actionable, measurable goals. SMART goals, for example, are:
- Specific: Saying you want to reduce costs by 10% by quarter three is much clearer than saying you want to reduce business costs. You could also define what you mean by business costs.
- Measurable: Cost reduction is something you can measure. Simply stating you want to “improve finances” is not.
- Attainable: Goals should be challenging but realistic. Reducing costs by 10% may be attainable for an organization whereas cutting costs by 50% would not be.
- Relevant: Ensure goals are relevant to the overall priorities and objectives of the business or team — or your own priorities). Reduced costs can lead to increased cash flow and savings, which are often relevant to business priorities.
- Time-bound: Put a timeline on goals to help ensure the related work is made a priority.
How do you make a goal tracker?
You can make a goal tracker on paper, on a whiteboard, or in a spreadsheet. You can also use monday.com’s Work OS templates and Goal Widget for a more convenient, customizable approach that lets you share goals tracking with all relevant stakeholders.
Track your way to success with monday.com
Recording your goals and tracking your progress on the right platform is just about as important as achieving them. Look for templates and trackers that are easy to customize for any need, like the ones you’ll find on monday.com Work OS.
Start tracking daily habits and achieving your goals with easy-to-use templates from monday.com.
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