A Dashboard for Your Year's Goals

January 10, 2025

The start of a new year, the most famous season for writing down goals.
There are all kinds of ways to pick goals, organize them, track them, and evaluate them.
The topic is simple, but there's so much variety in it that it becomes a big one, which is why you find so many books, magazines, and channels across social media publishing experiences, ideas, studies, research, and so on.

Today I'm sharing one of those ideas. It's mostly used in organizations and companies to track performance and compare it with past years, but things are different when the planning is personal. It tends to be simpler.

With the start of the year, you've probably set a group of goals, whether for the whole year, the first quarter, or maybe monthly. Goals, like we agreed, come in all shapes, but they're usually either a continuation of last year's goals or brand new ones.
Continuations of last year are things like reading a book a month, losing weight, exercising, and so on.
New goals are things like getting a professional certificate, starting a business, or losing weight (I started that one this year).

Great. In this idea, we'll try to make those goals trackable and measurable. There are lots of ways and tools for this, and honestly the way and the tool don't matter, because literally the notes app on your phone can do the job. What matters is the concept itself, along with the practices that come with it.

Let's start with the ongoing goals, the ones we began in past years, kept up this year, and want to improve on and do better at than last year. Take weight loss, for example, since it's a common one and lots of people have it as a goal. First we'll measure our current weight at the start of the year, look at the numbers we reached last year (weight, body fat percentage, muscle percentage), and save them somewhere (anywhere, even the phone's notes app), preferably as photos. Sometimes you second-guess yourself: did I write the number wrong, or did I edit it? Then every so often during the new year, we'll come back and check our progress.

Okay, what about the new goals we started this year?
We'll write them down, assume all the numbers are zero, and start building our progress. Next year, God willing, we'll try to beat this year's results. What I mean here is that we build the dashboard this year, and next year we set ambitious goals based on its results.

Most goals, if not all of them, can be turned into numbers, and you'll find the statistical side in them. That gives you your own personal yearly dashboard where you evaluate yourself and your performance. The point isn't the evaluation itself. The point is that you try to push those numbers up, and those numbers genuinely reflect your goals, and usually your growth and progress in different parts of life. That urge to raise the numbers is a lot like the urge you get in a game where you're scoring goals or collecting some item so you can win or climb the rankings.

What we're doing here is turning the process of achieving a goal into a game, or to put it more simply, into something fun.

Great. So how do we make this practical and keep it simple? Usually, when something gets complicated, setting it up is hard and keeping up with it is even harder. We'll try to make everything easy and within reach.

First, naturally, we need things we want to achieve. Examples:

A financial goal, like reaching a certain amount in assets, saving a certain sum, paying down certain debts, and so on. Financial matters are generally easy to work with because they're usually already numbers.
A fitness goal, like reaching a certain weight or percentage, whether losing, gaining, or building muscle, finishing a race, covering a distance, getting faster, or working out a certain number of days during the year.
A religious goal, like memorizing a certain amount of the Quran, a daily portion of Quran reading, or keeping up congregational prayers or the sunnah prayers.
A professional goal, like earning a certain number of certificates, publishing a certain number of projects, or working with a certain number of clients
And the list goes on. The point is just to see that there are numbers in your goals that can be tracked. And if you can't find a way, reach out to me and let's talk through the goal and try to make it measurable and trackable

So we've identified our goals, defined them, and made them measurable in the form of numbers.

Now we'll look at last year and see if we already have numbers for the goals we set. For example

How many professional certificates did we earn last year
What was my weight at the start of the year
How much are my savings
How much ..

There are things where, if you pay attention, you'll notice they've been giving you numbers all along, you just never noticed because you weren't in the habit of tracking numbers (you get things done and move on, mashallah, good for you).

Now that we've checked whether we already had numbers for our goals from before.

We'll make the tracking list. This list has one condition: "it's so within reach that you might open it by accident". There are plenty of good free apps for tracking goals you can put on your phone, like Todoist and Notion and Trello and maaaany more, even the notes app on your phone, even pen and paper (print the photos and stick them in a notebook), even a folder on your computer. The tools don't matter, the concept is what matters. Our concept says: a file that's easy to reach, with the points that matter to me about my goals written in it.

After that, you'll be visiting it regularly for two purposes: first to track, second to update.
Every time you come back to the things you wrote, they tend to stay present in your mind, you focus on them, and so you get them done. The thing that kills yearly goals is that we get busy for a while and then forget them. It's not that we stopped wanting them, no, we literally forget them.
And it's completely fine to change our goals. Life has its circumstances, and priorities can shift at any moment.

Now we have a new way of tracking, a dashboard, and numbers. That motivates us to improve how we track our goals so that next year we have more data and clearer numbers about our goals and how we did on them.

Recap?

I'll write down my goals if I haven't already
I'll check if there's data on them from last year
I'll make them numeric, measurable, trackable, with a way to calculate progress
Every so often, a day or two or a week or two, I'll look at them and update them
At the end of the year I'll have a yearly summary of my performance, my goals, the numbers I started with, and the numbers I reached.

And that's really it

Salam..