Take Action: Why Tracking Effort (Not Outcome) Is Your Next Move
Last month, I asked you to do something a little uncomfortable: audit your business. Look at your clients, your services, your operations, your team, your marketing — all of it, honestly, on paper. If you did it, you already know it wasn't a fun afternoon. But you also know something now that you didn't know before.
So here's the question I keep getting this week: “Okay, Naomi, I did the audit. Now what?”
Now we execute. And execution is where most good plans quietly die.
Here's why. When we set a big goal — grow revenue 20%, launch the new service line, finally fix our pricing — we almost always measure ourselves against the outcome. Did we hit the number? Every week that we haven't, it feels like failure, even when we're doing exactly the right things. That gap between effort and visible result is where motivation goes to die, and it's the single biggest reason good strategic plans end up back on a shelf by September.
There's real research behind this, and it's worth sitting with. A 2016 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, led by researcher Eric Harkin, reviewed 138 separate studies on goal achievement and found something consistent across nearly all of them: people who tracked their behavior — the actions they were actually taking — reached their goals more reliably than people who only tracked the outcome itself. Watching the input beat watching the scoreboard, over and over again.
Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile found something similar from a completely different angle. She and her co-author spent years analyzing thousands of workday diary entries from professionals across seven companies, trying to figure out what actually made people feel motivated and engaged at work. The single strongest driver wasn't recognition, or bonuses, or even hitting the big goal. It was visible daily progress — small, concrete evidence that the work was moving forward.
And then there's my favorite version of this idea, which comes from Jim Collins' research in Great by Choice (big shout-out to HC’s founder, Fred Irwin, for introducing us to this!). Collins studied companies that outperformed their industries by 10x or more over 15 years, and he tells the story of two explorers who raced to the South Pole in 1911. One team pushed hard on good days and rested on bad ones. The other committed to covering the same distance — 20 miles — every single day, rain or shine, no more, no less. The steady team won by weeks. Collins' research found the same pattern held true for the great companies: it wasn't the bursts of brilliance that separated them, it was consistency they could sustain no matter the conditions.
That's the whole idea behind this month's Featured Framework: Track Effort, Not Outcome (Worksheet #26). Instead of asking “did I hit the goal yet?” — which, for most meaningful goals, will be “no” for weeks or months — you ask a smaller, kinder, more useful question every day: how much effort did I put toward this today? Score it 1 to 5. At the end of the week, look at your average. If it's holding steady, you're doing exactly what you need to do, even if the outcome hasn't caught up yet. If it's slipping, that's your signal to ask why — and adjust before the goal quietly disappears.
This is the piece that turns a good audit into a real result. You already know where your business needs to go. This month, stop grading yourself on whether you've arrived, and start grading yourself on whether you're marching. Trust that consistency will yield results (I know you’re thinking about that sale!).
Pull up your audit from last month. Pick one goal that matters. Start your Level of Effort score this week.
You got this. We got you.
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SOURCES
Harkin, B., et al. (2016). “Does Monitoring Goal Progress Promote Goal Attainment?” Psychological Bulletin — meta-analysis of 138 studies.
Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle. Harvard Business Review Press.
Collins, J., & Hansen, M. (2011). Great by Choice. HarperBusiness (the “20 Mile March”).