Tracking Progress Helps, More When Written or Shared

Harkin and colleagues pooled 138 randomized experiments, mostly on health goals such as weight loss and diet, comparing people prompted to monitor their progress toward a goal with a group prompted less, differently, or not at all. On average, prompting monitoring improved goal attainment. The effect was larger when progress was physically recorded, such as written down, or reported to other people.

Put plainly: seeing what you do tends to help you steer it, and in these studies it helped more when it was recorded and when someone else saw it. The honest limit: noticing, like intending, isn’t the same as doing. A separate meta-analysis by Webb and Sheeran found that a medium-to-large change in what people intended led to a smaller, small-to-medium change in what they did. Noticing opens the door; plans and repetition walk through it.

Journey 2, Awareness, is built on that design: notice a pattern every day, write down what you notice in your Journey Book, and share it with someone else. What is one pattern you could jot down each time you catch it this week?