The halfway point.
How you feel about reaching it depends on how you feel about what you’re doing. Crossing the 13.1-mile mark means you’ve finished half the marathon already! Day four of a weeklong dream vacation, on the other hand, feels perilously close to the end. Sometimes, reaching the halfway point is an opportunity to check your bearings and adjust. (Very important, from a time management perspective!)
This happens all the time in tons of small ways. You’re reading a mystery novel and the detective arrests a key suspect – but you’re only halfway through the book, so you know that this probably isn’t the real bad guy and brace for more twists ahead. Halfway through painting a wall, you step back to see if you like the way the color looks in the room. When you’re in the middle of a work project, stopping at the midway point to share your progress with a colleague or client allows you to get valuable feedback that shapes your approach moving forward.
As we move from June into July, we’re all at the halfway point of this year. There’s perhaps no better time to pause, look back and ask yourself some questions. Namely: Have I accomplished about half of what I wanted to do so far this year? Am I on track to finish what I set out to do before the year ends?
Why Assess Goal Progress Now?
Tying goals progress to the calendar year might seem a bit arbitrary, especially if your work doesn’t really change from month to month. You might not even have goals that are specific to this year!
Still, I think the year’s midway point is a really helpful time to assess how you’re doing. You know how safety experts suggest checking your smoke alarm batteries when Daylight Saving Time starts and ends? It’s one of those tasks that might slip your mind for a long time if you didn’t have some consistent reminder. But when it’s tied to a specific date or calendar point, checking those batteries is easier to remember. The end of December and the end of June are natural times to take stock of where you are and where you want to go.
Assessing Your Own Halfway Point
Question: How can you measure something as vague as “progress on your goals”?
Answer: In any way that makes sense for you! As I like to say, we’re all wired differently. Your priorities, life and time management systems are unique to you, so how you evaluate yourself won’t necessarily be the same way that your friends would evaluate themselves.
The simplest way to assess your progress is to write out a list of the things that you wanted to make happen this year. Assign a percentage to each one that represents how much of it you’ve completed, or mark each item with “done” or “not done,” or use whatever metrics make sense to you. If you’re someone who likes to process information visually, you might be comfortable taking a bullet-journal approach and using color-coded symbols to see what’s been accomplished and what’s left on the to-do list.
The idea here is not to give yourself a letter grade, or to beat yourself up for the things you’ve fallen behind on (or the things you haven’t even started). Maybe health or family issues have made the last six months extra hard and you’re hyperaware of the fact that you’re struggling to meet your work and personal goals. Maybe, in thinking about the goals you set at the beginning of the year, you’ll even realize that your priorities have changed and that your goals need changing too. Wherever you are, I don’t want you to feel discouraged when you think about the fact that the year is half gone. The second half is still ahead.
Next time I’ll be talking about that second half, and how to set yourself up for success. In the meantime, if you need an extra boost to turn up your productivity AND have some time to yourself this summer check out my Jump Start Your Productivity Program. The self-study option means you can access all the training and materials on your own schedule plus it includes LIVE Q&A calls with me to get all of your questions answered. As a mid-year gift from me, take 50% off using the promo code SAVE50 at registration. Check out all the details here!
Gratefully,
Sarah
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