Does tracking your goals actually help you reach them? A 138-study answer
By Thomas Lovas Lokoy
Founder & builder of BrainLoop (NorwegianSpark SA). I build a goal tracker, so I have an interest; the figures here are from the published abstracts linked at the end, and my advice is labelled as mine.
Last updated: October 2026 · By Thomas Lovas Lokoy, founder & builder of BrainLoop. AI-assisted draft checked against the sources at the end. General information; where a goal involves money, this is not financial advice.
Goal trackers rest on an assumption so obvious that nobody checks it: if you watch your progress, you make more of it. It happens to be one of the better-tested assumptions in behaviour change, because "monitor your progress" is a component of so many interventions that researchers could pool a very large body of experiments. The pooled answer is yes, with a size and two conditions attached, and those conditions are more useful than the yes.
The pooled evidence
In 2016 Benjamin Harkin and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin titled "Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment?". They gathered 138 randomised studies with a combined 19,951 participants in which some people were prompted to monitor their progress toward a goal and others were not.1
Three results, as the abstract reports them:
Monitoring can be increased. The interventions did make people check their progress more often, which sounds trivial but is the precondition for everything else.
Attainment improved, modestly. People who monitored more achieved more of their goals. The effect is described as modest, not transformative. Part of the improvement in attainment ran through the increase in monitoring itself.1
Two moderators made it work better. The effect of monitoring was larger when progress was physically recorded, written or logged rather than just noticed, and when progress was reported publicly or to another person.1
That is the whole finding, and it is worth resisting the urge to inflate it. Monitoring is not a magic lever. It is a modest, reliable nudge that gets stronger when you write the number down and when someone else can see it.
Why "modest" is good news
A modest effect from a cheap action is a bargain. Writing a number in a tracker takes seconds and costs nothing. If that reliably tilts the odds, even a little, across 138 experiments, it earns its place in a routine without needing to be a miracle. The failure mode is expecting the tracker to do the work; the research says it helps you see the work, and seeing it helps a bit.
Where the "write it down" condition comes from in daily life
The same moderator shows up in a very different study on habits. Lally and colleagues followed 96 volunteers who each chose one daily behaviour and recorded every day whether they had done it. The time it took for the behaviour to feel automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days, and people who performed it more consistently got there faster; a single missed day did not materially affect the process.2 Daily recording was the method of the study, not its subject, but notice what it implies: the volunteers who got the most out of the twelve weeks were the ones who kept showing up and marking it, and a missed mark was not a disaster.
Put the two together and you have a position on streaks and progress bars that is neither cynical nor breathless. Record progress because recording is the part of monitoring with the larger effect. Do not panic over a gap because gaps did not materially derail the one real-world study that tracked them day by day.
How BrainLoop's Goal Tracker fits, exactly
I would rather you know what the Goal Tracker does and does not do before you lean on it.
Progress is a percentage you set. Each goal shows a percentage and a bar. You move it with +10% and −10% buttons. There is no automatic calculation from sub-tasks; you are the judge of how far along you are. Given the research, that is not a weakness: the act of deciding "I'm at 40 now" and pressing the button is the physical recording that the meta-analysis says matters.
Colour tells you the zone. Under 40 per cent the bar is red, from 40 to 74 amber, and from 75 green. It is a visual cue, nothing more.
The starter goals are examples. The app opens with four sample goals, including a savings target with a dollar figure and a reading goal, each with a made-up progress value. They are placeholders to show the layout; they are not advice and not yours. Add your own in the box at the bottom. A new goal starts at 0 per cent with the target and deadline shown as "TBD", because the app does not yet let you edit those fields.
No delete, no edit. You can add goals and nudge their percentages. You cannot currently rename, re-target or remove one. If a sample goal annoys you, leave it at its value and ignore it.
Saved on this device only. Goals live in your browser's local storage. There is no cloud copy, so your phone and your laptop keep separate lists, and clearing the site's data erases them for good.
Using a tracker the way the evidence suggests (my opinion)
- One line, one number, often. Open the tracker when something changes and move the percentage. The frequency of monitoring is itself part of the effect.
- Make the record physical. Pressing the button is a record; thinking "I'm about halfway" is not. If the app is not to hand, a note on paper does the same job.
- Tell someone the number. Monitoring worked better when it was public or reported. A weekly message to a friend with your percentages is a free upgrade to the whole method.
- Decide what 10 per cent means before you start. Because you set the percentage yourself, write down in the goal's name or in your journal what a step is: a chapter, a session, a sum saved. Otherwise the bar measures your mood.
- Expect a modest effect and a long road. The habit study's range was 18 to 254 days. The tracker helps you see the road; it does not shorten it.
The short version
Across 138 randomised studies, monitoring progress modestly improved goal attainment, and it worked best when progress was physically recorded and shared with someone. A goal tracker is useful precisely as a place to record, not as a motor. Set your own percentages, move them often, tell someone, and treat a missed week as a missed week rather than a verdict.
Sources
Footnotes
-
Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin. Abstract via Europe PMC: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/26479070 ↩ ↩2 ↩3
-
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. Abstract via the publisher record: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674 ↩
