354: Tracking Progress on Long-Term Projects When Motivation Is Low

354: Tracking Progress on Long-Term Projects When Motivation Is Low

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[00:00:00] I want to start today's episode by sharing something that happened recently in my group coaching program called the Grad Empowerment Coaching Circle. In the program, I'm working with a group of graduate students and professionals, in fact, all of them are graduate students and some of them are also working part-time and full-time in different roles.

And we had a session on sustaining motivation on long-term projects. This was something that everybody was interested in hearing about. They expressed this interest in their surveys, and that's how we formed the different topics. So we got to the topic of the week. And we started to discuss things like what it feels like to work on a dissertation or on a prospectus, or on field work, or a dissertation chapter, a manuscript for publication, grant applications, et cetera.

So these are projects that you're not doing [00:01:00] for a week or two. They extend on for months at a time. And it was interesting to hear from them because. A lot of their struggles sounded very similar. You know, when one person was struggling with ethnographic field work, another person could relate and offer some insights, some advice when another person was struggling with getting back to.

Their work. After taking some time off over winter break, someone else could resonate with how hard it's been to set aside time for ongoing writing. And one person in the group actually asked this question around. Different types of strategies to track your progress because we talked about how motivation wanes, it's always fluctuating and it's cyclical, and we also talked about different accountability strategies to keep [00:02:00] you going when motivation is low.

But another thing that can be helpful is tracking your progress. And I wasn't even gonna talk about this, but it's really funny, I guess I should mention it. I had a separate meeting. This was a coaching call, but it was coaching for me, it was business coaching. So I was in a business coaching call and someone mentioned the phrase. What did they call it? Success amnesia. And if I'm interpreting this correctly, I believe it refers to this idea of not really being able to see your impact and your success. And it reminds me of how a lot of us have negativity, biases, and it's really hard for us to recognize the work that we're doing.

And it's even harder when you're working on a long-term project, when it feels like it's never ending for you to recognize your progress and reward yourself for it. So I [00:03:00] thought, since one of my group coaching participants asked, do you have a resource for tracking your progress? My response was, I do, but of course, there's no one size fits all approach.

I say this all the time, and so I asked a couple of other questions and in the end I came to the conclusion that I wanted to, instead of offering one resource that may or may not work for them, why not I share different strategies or different methods for tracking your progress. And so that's the episode of today.

I am sharing the resource, of course, as a downloadable handout with my group coaching program. But I want you all to have the material as well. I want you all to learn, I want you all to apply this to your own circumstance. I want you to benefit from the work that I'm doing in my coaching programs because, I fully believe that we should not gatekeep, we should share information.[00:04:00]

Yes, you may not be someone who can pay for my services, but in listening, you're supporting me. And so this is a reciprocal relationship that we have. So let's get to the topic of today.

Welcome to the award-winning Grad School Femtoring podcast. The place for first gen BIPOCs to listen in on inclusive grad school stories and learn about personal development and productivity tips. This is Doctora Yvette Martinez Vu, a certified coach, consultant and author, and I will be serving as your femtor, providing you with insider knowledge to help you reach your personal and professional goals.

[00:05:00] Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Grad School Femtoring podcast. This is your host, Doctora Yvette. Today we're talking about tracking progress on long-term projects.

When motivation is low, shout out to the GECC participants. I am actually recruiting a second cohort, and I also recently had the privilege of receiving a sponsorship donation. So there was a sponsor who decided to donate to pay for one spot in my next group coaching program. And so if you're interested, you can check out more details on the GECC, you can sign up for the wait list and express your interest in that sponsorship spot.

And I also wanna mention that, if you are someone who's in the position to sponsor someone else or to make a small donation to Grad School Femtoring to specifically support a [00:06:00] scholarship for someone else, please reach out. I haven't shared this publicly, I haven't shared it on social media, and this is only the only other place I've shared about it other than my newsletter.

So I shared in my newsletter that I have a sponsorship spot available for my group coaching program, and within a day I had seven people interested. So that means this work is needed, folks could benefit from the financial support. So if you are in the position to fully or partially sponsor someone, pease be in touch and you can also check out my donation link in my show notes. It's always there. I would appreciate, and I know we would all appreciate being able to offer more scholarships for individuals who can benefit from my services.

Okay, so I am going to start by talking about why motivation drops on long-term projects. [00:07:00] In my group coaching program, I spent a little bit more time talking about motivation, what it is and what it's not. And I'm not gonna go into that right now. But what I wanna say is that long term projects are de-motivating. And you could even say that it's demotivating by design because it takes so long, it's so hard to visualize your progress.

A lot of times it feels like it's never ending. , A lot of times it's ambiguous, you're lacking clarity in how to do the work. And so if you're going on for weeks at a time or months at a time working on something with a lack of clarity with very few rewards, it's really, really easy for you to feel like.

I'm not doing enough or I should be doing more, or what even is the purpose of doing all of this. And so if [00:08:00] you find yourself with your motivation, dipping, it's common when you're working on a long-term project. It's also common because of the fact that motivation just wanes over time in general.

And so if motivation is constantly waning based on your circumstances, your identities, the season that you're in, you're gonna find yourself at some point working on this project and feeling like you have very little motivation, and that brings me back to this idea of tracking progress. How does tracking progress help with that?

Because it helps you to remove motivation as the thing that you need to have to get the work done. Instead of relying on motivation, which is not something that's reliable, right, because it dips and wanes, instead, you can rely on a system or on a progress tracker to help you to remember what to work on next and how often to work on it, and how to maintain that consistency.[00:09:00]

So we don't need to feel ready to do the work. We don't need to feel good to feel the work. In fact, in that coaching session, business coaching session, we had a whole side topic on someone who was struggling with growth and discomfort. The discomfort that comes with growing and getting out of your comfort zone.

And so I will say this, no matter where you are in your career, as you keep advancing, as you keep growing, as you keep doing bigger things, it's not gonna feel comfortable. You're, you may never feel ready, so you may not feel ready to do this long-term project. You may not be motivated to do it, but you can create a system or a method for yourself that helps you to externalize your progress, that can help you to have evidence of your effort and that can help you to keep going, especially on the harder days.

[00:10:00] So these strategies that I'm gonna share, I'm not just gonna mention them, I'm gonna mention the energy level required for each. And by this I mean, what's the cognitive and emotional and even organizational logistical effort of setting it up. So I'll mention the energy level.

I'll mention who it's best for. So I'm thinking about your learning style, your working style, your neuro type, where you are in your project, your project stage, and or. Your emotions and how you're feeling in any given time. And then I'm also gonna mention ways to gamify it. And that's a whole other topic on gamifying your work that I could definitely go into.

I might write it down as a topic for the future. And I was reminded of this again because of a participant in my group coaching program who mentioned that she gamifies her work and it's actually a brilliant strategy and it works and it's even more helpful for [00:11:00] those of us with ADHD. , It can really help you to continue to get things done when you gamify it and when you constantly reward yourself.

So let's get into the strategies.

The first one is time-based tracking, so this is where you track how much time you spend working rather than what you produce rather than the outcome. This can be helpful for days when you feel like you spent all day and all you produced was one paragraph of writing, but if you. Only focus on the outcome.

You're not recognizing all the other things you did that might still be writing related. You might have been reading and reviewing articles. You might have been taking notes. You might have sent a voice memo to yourself. Talking out loud on the topic, maybe you generated three pages of messy writing and only one paragraph of it was polished.

Maybe you fixed your [00:12:00] formatting and your citations, maybe you updated your outline, et cetera. There's so many things that you might have been doing that are still writing related, but not necessarily reaching the outcome that you hoped. And so as you track your time, it's a different way of you focusing on the process rather than the outcome.

This is best for writers whose progress is hard to measure, , especially for academics where it feels like you're always in a rabbit hole of reading and note-taking, and it's never ending in terms of the citations that you pull from, et cetera. It's also good for anyone who's rebuilding consistency or your confidence in the work. Maybe you took some time away from your work and you're getting back to it, and so you wanna get back into a routine and it feels easier to say, I'm going to be working for these two blocks of writing time a week, instead of focusing on the outcome. And this is [00:13:00] also good for my neurodivergent folks who benefit from more effort based metrics rather than outcome based metrics.

How do you gamify it? You can have time ranges. Like every week I'm gonna work on this for three to five hours at a time. Or you list and then you check off every 25 minute session or every 45 minute session.

I do something similar on a whiteboard. I'll write down what I'm gonna be working on. And actually I do like the reverse tracking, where I'll write down my pomodoro every 25 minutes. I'll write pom one for pomodoro one, and then after I'm done, I'll just put it on the whiteboard what I actually got done. So the goal is not, oh, I have to get specific type of outcome.

The goal is just do whatever I can in these two hours that I have. So you could add your sticker charts, add your check marks, or [00:14:00] you could even set up a streak page or a streak list, like something where you track your streak so that way you know that you touched it and that you showed up even if you only showed up for half an hour today.

The second progress tracking strategy is creating a task checklist, and this is great when you identify the task and then you break it up into micro tasks. And the energy level here is, oh, I don't even know if I mentioned the energy level for the time-based tracking. So time-based tracking, I would say is more medium.

This one is lower. Or maybe low to medium depending on the person. All you have to do is break up your goals into small concrete steps. And I say all you have to do, and I know this is not always simple for everyone, but it could be as simple as [00:15:00] one check for open the document. Another check for, reread the comments of feedback. I received another check for revise one paragraph or address, one comment and another check for save my progress, write down what I got done and close the document.

Task checklists are great for those of us with ADHD for those of us who might feel overwhelmed or avoidant if you're just getting started on the project so you feel like you need to break it down more, or even if you're in a high stress season, it can help to break it up into very, very tiny baby steps.

How do you gamify this? You can color code your check marks. So in my case, using color coded markers for my whiteboard, you could count the tasks that you completed, or you can create a weekly done list of everything that you got [00:16:00] done 'cause again, it's hard to visualize our effort and that can help you to do that.

The third strategy are spreadsheets or a very simple tracker. This requires a little bit more effort. Medium to high. I guess it depends on whether or not you're a spreadsheet person, so if you're not, it might be high effort. If you are, it might be more medium effort. This is where you are logging your sessions, your milestones, any outcomes in a spreadsheet or a table.

And one of my very, very first coaching client back in 2016-17 was , someone who was finishing up their dissertation and they, I believe they asked for a way to track their progress, and they wanted to touch their dissertation every single day. And so I created a daily progress tracker for this person.

And it was a simple [00:17:00] spreadsheet with the date and what they got done, and if they didn't touch it, what got in the way. And so you can do that for yourself. This is great. For those of you that are more data oriented, you want to see the information on a spreadsheet. You could even get to the level of detail of tracking the amount of time, or tracking specific number of sessions, et cetera.

It helps you to notice patterns. So if you're a pattern seeker, it's great for you and it's also great for those of us that are working on grants or multi-stage projects, we're having a spreadsheet to track that can be helpful or it might even be required.

How do you gamify it? One thing you could do is create a progress bar or some sort of chart or diagram, like something where you can see your effort. As you input the data into your spreadsheet, you could [00:18:00] automatically set up your equations in the spreadsheet so that you can get those cumulative totals. You could get the total amount of time, the total amount of words.

Some people I know when they're working, they focus on word count, and that's how they know that they're done with their session. Or you could try other types of conditional formatting. This is outside of the scope of my expertise, I've never formally taken a lesson on how to use excel, but I've learned a lot on my own, and I know that just adding equations, adding progress bars can be enough for you to see your progress.

Now the fourth different method is to create a simple timeline. And I love timelines. Y'all know if you work with me in one-on-one or in group coaching, at some point I am going to mention a timeline. Timelines are so great, especially for those of [00:19:00] us that are bottom up thinkers and struggle to see the big picture.

This is where you map out a project across several weeks or months. Usually I start with months at a time because it's a long-term project. So it's gonna take you one to two years to do this. It's helpful to break it down into months, and then you either add a checklist or some sort of way to track your progress of completing each milestone for that month.

So again, this is good for those of us that struggle with big picture thinking, but want to do that work. This is great for big picture thinkers too. So if you're a top down thinker, it might be your go-to. This is great for those of us that have multiple deadlines that wanna have everything in one place, and this is also really good for later stage projects because you need that timeline to keep you on track since you're getting close to your firm deadlines.

How [00:20:00] do you gamify it in this case? I would make sure you have a way to cross off your phases. So how are you going to know that you've gone from one phase to the next, to the next? In your timeline, are you breaking it up into quarters or are you breaking it up by month?

Another thing you can do is has some sort of milestone ritual. So maybe at the end of every month or at the end of every quarter or at the end of any big milestone, you will do something to celebrate and. You can also set it up so that you have some wiggle room or buffer weeks, and this is something that you account for so that way you don't feel bad when you have to take that time. And this could mean buffer weeks for rest, buffer weeks for time off, buffer weeks for if you unexpectedly get sick, et cetera. And using it is not a bad [00:21:00] thing. Instead, you can treat it as a win. Because you've already accounted for that in your timeline.

The next method is planner based tracking. This, it requires maybe low to medium effort, and by the way, the timeline would probably require more high effort. So in this case, planner based tracking is less daunting than creating a timeline. I know that I relied a lot on planner based tracking when I was a grad student. I don't use it as much anymore, I'll be frank about that. But in this case, if you are a planner person, you can use it to directly write on it and have a section on what you worked on for your project.

And this is great for those of us that already have planners and who use them, especially analog planners, printed planners. This is great for anyone who wants a low tech system. So if you [00:22:00] know that your go-to is to track things on paper, then why not use a planner for that? And this is good for anyone who's routine oriented, and I think this is why it worked for me as a grad student because I thrive in a very solid, rigid routine that just works for me. I know it doesn't work for everyone. It works for me. So if you are someone who's like that, who's very routine oriented, having a thing that you can go to regularly and check off or write down in the same planner every day can be helpful.

How do you gamify it? Here, I would recommend playing around with colors, with highlighters, with a way to track touching the project, or maybe even if your planner has reflection pages, to write down updates on your reflection pages. And then again, to find a way to reward yourself for touching it and for [00:23:00] reflecting on it.

The next method or strategy is to have a dedicated notebook. So again, we're continuing on with this idea of doing work in a more analog way, or for those of us who want low tech systems. This one similar to the planner, requires less energy. I would say it would, it's more low energy. You just get a simple notebook, and I've been using notebooks more recently because I'm getting tired of just everything being digital. So get yourself a single notebook. I got myself some lefty notebooks. I am left-handed and I am in my late thirties, and I have never purchased a left-handed notebook for myself, so I got myself left-handed notebooks, so you get one notebook and you use that single notebook only for your project.

[00:24:00] And I got this idea from Cal Newport in his, I don't know what his podcast is called, Deep Questions Podcast, where the purpose of the episode was to talk about how to use notebooks for, I think it's a single purpose notebook planning that might have been what the topic was on. So the idea, the central idea, is to use one notebook for one thing. So I have a notebook to take notes during any calls. So someone else is talking, that's my queue to write in the notebook. And I have another notebook for idea generation, inspiration, et cetera.

And so in your case, you could have a single notebook for all things tracking your project notes wins, questions, next steps. This is great for anyone who likes to hand write, anyone who's more of a read write processor, [00:25:00] reflective processor. This is good for again, folks who like to think as they write and who do better when they hand write. And this is good for anybody who might be feeling a bit of anxiety and needs some time to just process things in writing.

How do you gamify it? Make sure you, this is true across the board, but especially true for this one. Give yourself some sort of win. Every time you use the notebook, make sure that you number your work sessions.

Again, this can help you with generating a streak, which can be fun. And you can even add some symbols or some tabs just to separate things once you get from one phase to the next phase, adding a colorful tab just to signal the progress that you're making. Or you could have symbols of every time you reach a certain milestone, you add a symbol or you add a sticker, et cetera.[00:26:00]

The second to last strategy I'm gonna share today is more related to visual tracking. And this is all about using visual cues and it's very, very low effort. It's use whatever works for you, right? So use the stickers, use the colorful markers, use some shading, use the symbols to mark the work that you've done for each session.

And you can get creative with this. So there's no right or wrong way to do this. Do you wanna do it on a whiteboard? Do you wanna do it on a Google Doc? Do you wanna do this on a notebook? You name it, you can figure out a way to do this. But it's really good for those of us that are more visual learners, or for those of us that need to have something in front of us so that we remember.

It's that those of us that struggle with object [00:27:00] permanence of we're not gonna know that anything's happening or that progress is being made unless we visualize it. This is good when you're feeling a motivation dip, 'cause it can again, add that dopamine boost to have those cute stickers or nice colors.

And this is good for anyone who's just like really struggling with low energy so give yourself those stickers per session or whatever other visual cue or reward per session has some colorful themes, and don't forget to reward yourself.

Okay. The last strategy I'm gonna share today is the very, very low effort I touched the project tracking. So if you touch the project in any way, even for five minutes, it counts. Where are you gonna track this? And again, it can be in many different ways. It can be on a spreadsheet, it can be on a document that's on [00:28:00] your computer. It could be on notion or project management space. It could be in a notebook. But the point is to track the fact that you touched it.

And this is also good for folks who wanna do this regularly. Maybe you wanna touch the project every day, or you wanna touch the project every weekday. So having those touch streaks can be helpful. It's good for anyone with fluctuating capacity where you know that you can't, or it's not realistic for you to be consistent every week with the same amount of time and effort. And so if your energy is constantly fluctuating, if you're dealing with chronic illness, flare ups, et cetera, touching the project and having a way to track that can be helpful. It's also good for those of us who have very busy, complicated lives for parents, caregivers, just folks who have so much going on with them.

Reminding yourself that you're still touching it and not giving up [00:29:00] can be helpful. And how do you gamify this? Again, adding the streaks, adding how many touch counts did you get to each month or each week? And reminding yourself that showing up for your project counts as long as you show up.

As long as you make progress, even if it fits slow, it's still doing the work. Alright, so those are my different strategies. The whole point here is for you to find something that works, and I want you to personalize it. I want you to find a way to track your work without it feeling bad. You don't want to feel shame, you don't wanna feel avoidant, you don't wanna feel self-critical.

It should be a system that makes you feel good about it, that lets you take a look at the work that you're doing and [00:30:00] reminds you to keep going, so figure out which one works for you, depending on your energy level or depending on your identities and circumstances, and choose one. Try one for the next couple of weeks and then reassess if it's not quite working. No problem. Try something else.

There might be something that even I didn't mention today, and if you try something completely different that works for you, I wanna hear about it. Let me know. If you found this helpful, send it to a friend. As always, please leave a review. I'm always so grateful for them. If you want to join my group coaching program, you still have time.

The deadline is coming up soon. I'm asking everyone to submit their application by. January 19th, and the cohort starts right away next month at the top of the month. So reach out if you have questions. Check out the info, get on my wait list, and maybe I'll be working with you soon. All right? As always, [00:31:00] I'll talk to you all next time.

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu: Thanks so much for listening. If you liked what you heard, here are three ways you can support the show. The first is to make sure you're subscribed and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. The second way is to get your copy of my free resource kit linked in my show notes. This kit includes tools, playlists on all things grad school, productivity, and personal development.

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