Does monitoring goal progress work? 138 experiments, and what they say about writing it down
Does monitoring goal progress work? Harkin et al. (2016) pooled 138 experiments: d+ = 0.40, larger when progress was recorded and reported. A weekly scorecard follows.
In this article8 sections
Yes, on average, and by a moderate margin. In 2016, Benjamin Harkin, Thomas Webb, Betty Chang, Andrew Prestwich, Mark Conner, Ian Kellar, Yael Benn and Paschal Sheeran published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin (volume 142, pages 198 to 229) of studies that randomly assigned people to either a prompt to monitor goal progress or a control condition. It covered 138 studies and 19,951 participants. Monitoring goal progress is the practice of repeatedly checking, in some concrete way, how far you are from a goal.
What did the meta-analysis find?
Prompting people to monitor increased how often they did it (d+ = 1.98), and it improved goal attainment (d+ = 0.40, 95 percent CI 0.32 to 0.48). Changes in how often people monitored accounted for the improvement. Most of the studies concerned health goals such as weight, diet, smoking and blood pressure, so the evidence is thinnest for goals outside health.
Which versions worked best?
Two features separated the stronger studies from the weaker ones.
| How progress was monitored | Effect on goal attainment (d+) | Comparisons |
|---|---|---|
| Public | 0.55 | 3 |
| Private, but reported to someone | 0.47 | 95 |
| Private, not reported | 0.19 | 14 |
| Physically recorded | 0.43 | 106 |
| Not recorded | 0.29 | 32 |
Reporting beat keeping it to yourself, and writing it down beat holding it in your head. The authors suggest recorded information is easier to remember and harder to ignore, since people tend to look away from numbers that reflect badly on them. For reported progress they list public commitment, a sense of accountability and concern about how one appears to others as possible reasons, and note these were not tested directly.
One more result is useful. Monitoring behavior moved behavior (d+ = 0.79, 17 comparisons) but not outcomes. Monitoring outcomes moved outcomes (d+ = 0.62, 30 comparisons) but not behavior. Track the thing you want to change.
How far can the findings be pushed?
The headline effect comes from randomized comparisons. The recorded and reported contrasts do not: they compare different studies, which differ in many other ways, and the authors say several of these features are probably correlated. The public group rests on only three comparisons. So the table supports “recorded and reported versions did better across the literature”, not “adding a witness adds 0.28 to your results”.
What would a weekly scorecard look like?
A format consistent with the findings, offered as a suggestion rather than something the paper tested:
- Choose one number for the thing you do (nights in bed by 11, pages written), plus one for the result if it matters, such as weight. Goodhart’s law is the reason to keep the list short.
- Record it the same day on paper or in a spreadsheet, so there is something to confront on Sunday. The diary-study evidence on small wins is a good reason to log the good days too.
- Send the week’s numbers to one named person on a fixed day. The raw numbers, not a verdict on how it went.
- Write one adjustment for next week.
A check-in that records and reports itself does this automatically; the video DontSnooze asks for when an alarm fires is one example, and a shared sheet does the same for goals that have no alarm. Whatever the tool, a goal that gets looked at repeatedly is harder to forget.
FAQ
What does an effect size of d+ = 0.40 mean for goal monitoring?
It means people prompted to monitor their progress finished about 0.40 standard deviations ahead of control groups on average. If the scores are roughly bell-shaped, that puts the typical monitoring participant ahead of about two thirds of the control group. By Cohen’s usual labels it sits between small and medium.
Is monitoring in private useless?
No. In the 14 comparisons where progress was monitored privately and not reported to anyone, the effect on goal attainment was still positive (d+ = 0.19, 95 percent CI 0.05 to 0.33). It was simply the smallest of the three groups. Adding a recipient is the upgrade the data points to.
How often should I check my progress?
The paper gives no ideal schedule. Interventions raised monitoring frequency (d+ = 1.98) and this rise carried the effect on attainment. Intervention length had no measurable effect, which suggests the habit of looking matters more than how long the programme ran.