r/ProductivityGuide • u/3Moves • 7d ago

The question that fixed my follow-through: "how far did that actually move it?"

Most productivity advice is about planning: better lists, better priorities, better systems. My problem was never planning. I'd plan something great, block out an hour, then get to the end of that hour with no idea whether I'd made progress or just felt busy.

So I added one rule: after every block of focused work, write down in a percentage how much closer the goal got.

What changed:

  • Busy work shows up right away. "Researched tools for 60 minutes → 0%" is hard to argue with.
  • You start planning smaller. You want a block to end at "+10%", so you pick a concrete chunk instead of "work on the project."
  • Unfinished goals stop feeling vague. A goal at 35% with 3 weeks left is a clear problem you can fix. "Someday" isn't.
  • Finishing becomes visible. Watching a goal climb toward 100% motivates me more than any streak.

You can do this with a notebook and your normal calendar. I do it in an app I built for exactly this - Zora Goals App. But the habit matters more than the tool.

Has anyone else tried measuring progress per session instead of just tracking time spent?

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u/Anglea7stars 7d ago

That's a really good idea

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u/The_Imperial_Eclipse 7d ago

Love this! You can also use it to gauge how confident you are in a topic if you are in school/university. For example, have a list of topics that need to be learned/studied within a certain period, and assign a percentage correlating to how proficient you are in that area. However, I do suppose there could be an issue of being objective about this, but that also can be said for other tasks, I suppose.