The Importance of Measuring Improvement

Improvement is not the distance between the place you currently stand and the place where the finish line is, but between the place you currently stand in relation to the place you started. How to measure improvement, and the reasons to do so, becomes critical when dealing with challenging goals.

The thing is, we have a terrible memory. We might vaguely remember actual facts, but we are hardly able to relive our emotions during past, non traumatic experiences. You might remember that you felt happy, sad, disappointed, hopeful at some certain moment of your life, but what you remember are the thoughts you had during these experiences, and not the emotions itself.

Why is Measuring Improvement Relevant to Success?

Most of the time when we set a goal, we must achieve some degree of improvement or development early on; otherwise, we tend to lose motivation and drop the goal. Even when we have invested a great deal of effort, and have obtained positive results in the past, if a considerable period of time goes by without any sign of development, motivation goes down quickly.

Even when we might have had positive results in the past, if we are unable to relive the emotional responses those positive results provoked in ourselves, which happens fairly quickly due to our poor emotional memory, we tend to get discouraged.

This is the reason why someone with the goal of losing weight might have felt very good after losing 15 pounds, but time goes by without further improvement, s/he won’t feel so good, even after remembering [the facts about] his/her previous successes. You can remember that you lose weight, but you cannot relive the emotions you felt.

Acknowledging Improvement

The point of measuring improvement isn’t to relive past emotional responses, but to provoke new ones, based not on new successes but in the acknowledgment of continual measured improvement. Turns out that much like our emotional memory, our factual memory also sucks, even when we don’t realise it. We just forget what we forgot.

Back to the example of our friend with the goal of losing weight, s/he might remember without much trouble what the goal was from the beginning and the end results that s/he is looking for. But s/he might have a hard time trying to remember in detail the actual events that push his/her to commit to this particular goal or his/her bad performance the first weeks of intense physical activities. By being unable to recall these facts or details, the more subtle and common improvements loses meaning.

When we successfully record progress, it won’t make a different just after a couple of days, but when we look back after a considerable period of time and we witness the difference between the person that we used to be and the person that we are now, it can provoke an emotional response as strong as hitting a milestone.

How to Measure Improvement

Measuring improvement will depend greatly on your particular goal and your preferences; however, there’re some basic methods that can be applied to practically any goal:

1. Journaling: It might sound cheesy, but journaling is one of the most effective methods to track improvement in relation to every kind of goal. Journaling about how we feel emotionally and physically during a long period of time can be amazingly enlightening, even more when we are pursuing improvement in some aspect of our live. The act of journaling about our circumstances will not only be beneficial to our every day life, but it will also be a great source of information to our future self.

If you are doubtful about the effects of retrospection, just go to your Facebook account and check the comments you made 5 years ago, or the pictures you used to post. I assure you, you will be shocked. The same thing applies when you journal honestly and consistently during a long period of time and come back to reread your thoughts.

2. Spreadsheet: Another great and quick way to measure improvement is by keeping an updated spreadsheet. This will only be applicable to goals that can be measured by numbers, but most goals can be brought down to numbers one way or another. Wether is how much money you have saved every month, how many days have you go to the gym, or how many word have you written during the week.

Keeping a spreadsheet can help you see clearly how much have you improved during a given period. With this information you can easily conclude if the methods you are using to achieve your goals are working, the estimated time to the finish line and if the results are meeting your expectations.

3. Visual Comparison: Facts might be helpful, but nothing has more power to provoke a strong emotional reaction than an image. There’s a reason why people say that a picture worths a thousand word. Even when is not applicable to every goal, tracking your improvement by visual means can be one of the most effective methods. Whether by taking pictures, recording videos or even drawing or painting, visual representations of your improvement will yield a spike of motivation.

Our brains are the most amazing tool the human specie might have asked for, but it also comes with some limitations. In some aspects of life, our brains are still worried about surviving in the African wilderness, without realizing that the world where we look to thrive today have different predators, our own selves included.