Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress—if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don’t know how well you are doing, you can’t adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently—weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

It’s just not possible to stay motivated without feedback. No one is comfortable operating in a vacuum. Fundamentally, this is a result of the way our brains are wired. We subconsciously tune in to the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we want to be. When your brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at it: attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower.

When you don’t have any idea how well you’re doing, or when you have only a vague sense of where you stand with respect to your goal, the discrepancy isn’t clear. As a result, motivation is diminished, if not wiped out all together. It’s the discrepancy that signals that an action is needed; without a discrepancy, nothing happens.

When you undertake a goal, you are going to need frequent feedback to maintain clarity about the progress you are (or aren’t) making. If you aren’t getting it from someone else, you have no choice but to seek it out yourself through self-monitoring.

Unfortunately, there is no simple rule of thumb for how often you should be assessing your progress. The optimal frequency will depend on goal duration. (Do you want to reach the goal this week, this year, or in five years?) For long-term goals, it makes sense to allow more time between assessments. For shorter-term goals, however, you want to assess your progress more frequently to make sure you are on track, since there is less room—or more accurately, time—for error.

Feedback frequency should also depend on where you are in the learning curve. Recent research suggests that you shouldn’t engage in too much self-assessment when you are first trying to get the hang of something. Having to turn your attention away from what you are doing in order to process feedback is most disruptive when you working on a task that’s new and unfamiliar, creating cognitive and emotional demands that can interfere with learning and performance. So keep self-monitoring to a minimum until you have a better sense of what to do and how you should do it.

If self-monitoring and seeking out feedback are so important, you may be wondering why we don’t always do it. The first and most obvious reason is that it is effortful; you need to stop whatever else you’re doing and really focus on assessment. And of course, the news isn’t always positive; sometimes we avoid checking in on our progress because we don’t want to come face to face with how little progress we’ve made. (Do you ever find yourself avoiding the bathroom scale? Exactly.) So self-monitoring requires a lot of willpower (more on that later). You can make it easier by using if-then planning to schedule your self-assessments.

There’s one more essential point to make about assessing progress. Done the right way, it will keep you motivated from start to finish. Done the wrong way, it can give you a premature sense of accomplishment that may actually lower your motivation. Recent research by University of Chicago psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach examined how people pursuing goals were affected by focusing on either how far they had already come (to-date thinking) or what was left to be accomplished (to-go thinking). People routinely use both kinds of thinking when evaluating their progress. A marathon runner may choose to think about the miles already traveled or the ones that lie ahead. A dieter who wants to lose thirty pounds may try to fight temptation by reminding himself of the twenty pounds already lost, or the ten left to go.

Intuitively, both approaches have their appeal. But too much to-date thinking, focusing on what you’ve accomplished so far, will actually undermine your motivation to finish rather than sustain it.

Koo and Fishbach’s studies consistently show that when we are pursuing a goal and consider how far we’ve already come, we feel a premature sense of accomplishment and begin to slack off. For instance, in one study, college students studying for an exam in an important course were significantly more motivated to study after being told that they had 52 percent of the material left to cover, compared to being told that they had already completed 48 percent.

When we focus on progress made, we’re also more likely to try to achieve a sense of “balance” by making progress on other important goals. As a result, we wind up with lots of pots on the stove, but nothing is ever ready to eat.

If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it’s heightened. So when you are assessing your progress, stay focused on the goal and never congratulate yourself too much on a job half-done. Save it for a job well—and completely—done.

Putting It into Practice: Monitoring Your Progress

1. Decide how often you should be assessing the progress you’ve made toward your goal. (This may involve some trial and error; don’t be surprised if you feel you need more or less frequent feedback down the road.)
2. Determine where the information you need to assess your progress will come from, and how you will get it. Can you completely self-assess, or do you need an objective opinion or another person’s expertise?
3. Create reminders for yourself to perform your assessments. You can use your calendar, or Post-its, or create a set of if-then plans to assess progress at particular points. (Don’t just say “I’ll remember to.” You’re busy. You probably won’t.)
4. To keep yourself motivated, always end your assessments by thinking about what still needs to be done in order to reach your goal—how far you have left to go, rather than how far you’ve already come.