Goal trackers for personal and business success

Blog: Monday Project Management Blog

Many people track the details of their days to stay on track and organized. But are you tracking the bigger picture as you work toward personal or professional goals? By recording your goals and tracking them, you automatically increase your chance of success.

Keep reading below to discover the role goal trackers can play in your 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 track, manage, and meet all your goals.

What are goal trackers?

Goal trackers are documents that help you see where you are in relation to your goals. 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 integrate with other templates to support automation or ensure multiple people or teams can see progress toward goals.

Your goal tracker doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It should capture the information that’s most important for your success (or the success of your team). Goal trackers that are easy to complete are used more often than cumbersome forms, so keep that in mind when designing yours. 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 colored in or completed as you obtain results

Using goal trackers can be fun and rewarding. But before you get to work 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 creates a process that lets you visualize your success in detail as you work toward it. It also forces you to record information about your goals on a regular basis. 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 provides clarity of purpose. When someone starts and ends with a goal tracker daily, they know what they need to do and are more likely to stick to it. 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. You can go back and review goal tracker data to identify slow periods and bottlenecks or challenges that 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 end of month? Create a goal tracker to let people enter how many they complete each day. Seeing the work stack up toward the goal encourages everyone to keep going.

Business or team goal trackers. Business goal trackers record progress toward a specific objective. You can set team goals so everyone can see how the department or group is doing as a whole. Goal trackers for individual employees let you know how they’re doing and keep them updated on their own progress. That type of communication can be invaluable during evaluations or coaching sessions.
Individual professional goal trackers. You don’t need your business to set up a goal tracker to have one for professional goals. Set up your own to know exactly where you stand or keep track of milestones and positive movement in your career.
Personal goal trackers. Track progress toward personal goals such as fitness, learning, saving, or paying down debt. Goal trackers are also motivational when you’re tackling a huge personal project. Keep tabs on your DIY kitchen remodel or track the number of rows you completed on a full-size crochet blanket.

Every one of these goal tracking options is possible in Work OS. Next, we’ll take a look at some of the ways monday.com supports goal tracking and what customizations you can take advantage of.

monday.com’s Work OS goal tracking features

We know how important goal setting and tracking are to success, which is why we’ve filled Work OS with lots of great goal-related features. Search for templates to manage business or personal goals, or start with a basic template and customize it to get the results you want. Collect data with your templates and integrate it into your dashboard with the Goal Widget, which makes it easy to see progress at a high level.

monday.com templates for goal tracking

If you can’t find it, you can quickly build it, making Work OS your one-stop shop for goal-related templates. Here are just a few you might want to consider:

Quarterly objectives. Track efforts on goals that take a while to achieve or set and manage quarterly goals to improve your business. Setting quarterly objectives 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.
Monthly budget template. Manage monetary goals with tools like the monthly budget tracker. 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.

Our resources aren’t just designed to track goals. Work OS provides comprehensive tools to help individuals or teams think about objectives, prioritize efforts, and set strong goals. Check out a few of those resources below.

More resources for managing your goals

Goals template

Setting good goals 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 goals 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. 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. You can 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, a 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 is the one that’s easy and works with your personal or business needs. If you hate using a goal tracker 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.

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:

Don’t say you want to reduce business costs. Say you want to reduce costs by 10% by quarter 3.
Don’t say you want to feel healthier. Instead, set a goal for being able to run 3 miles or having 10% more energy daily.
Goals should be challenging but realistic. If you need executive approval for an effort and don’t have it, for example, that goal may not be attainable.
Ensure goals are relevant to the overall priorities and objectives of the business or team (or your own priorities).
Time-bound. Put a timeline on goals to help ensure you get to work on them.

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 an entire team

Track your way to success with monday.com

Record your goals and track your progress with templates and trackers that are easy to customize for any need. Personal, business, and team goals all fit on Work OS. Easy-to-use tools support team buy-in, making it more likely goal trackers are used on a regular basis for best results.

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