Scoring yourself every week feels brutal, but the data says otherwise

Most people assume that keeping score on yourself is a form of self-punishment, something that chips away at confidence rather than building it. Brian Moran and Michael Lennington argue the opposite is true, pointing to research on workplace motivation suggesting that measurement builds self-esteem and confidence precisely because it documents progress, rather than damaging it the way most of us fear.

Picture someone with a straightforward goal: lose ten pounds in twelve weeks. Her plan includes doing twenty minutes of cardio three times a week, training with weights three times a week, drinking at least six glasses of water daily, and keeping calorie intake under twelve hundred a day. At the end of the first week, she steps on the scale and finds she's down two pounds. Good news, surely.

But Moran and Lennington would ask a second, separate question: how many of her planned actions did she actually complete? Say the honest answer is three out of four categories, most days. That's a seventy five percent execution score. The two numbers, the pounds lost and the percentage executed, are telling her different things. The weight is a lag indicator, the end result. The execution score is a lead indicator, a measure of whether she's doing the things that will keep producing that result. Losing two pounds while scoring seventy five percent is encouraging, but it doesn't guarantee next week looks the same, because the weight so far may reflect effort from weeks ago, or plain luck.

This is why the two numbers need to stay separate rather than blending into one vague sense of how things are going. Moran and Lennington have found that clients who complete roughly eighty five percent of their planned weekly actions are very likely to hit their twelve week goals, while those scoring sixty five to seventy percent still do reasonably well if they stay in the game. The number that matters most, though, isn't the flattering one on the scale. It's the honest one that tells you whether you actually did what you said you would.

Each week, ask yourself two separate questions rather than blending them into one vague impression: what result did you get, and what percentage of your planned actions did you actually complete? Count up the specific things you committed to and be honest about how many you finished, even on the weeks that number is embarrassingly low. Aim for roughly eighty five percent completion as your marker of a genuinely excellent week, not perfection. And if your results stall, resist the urge to blame the plan itself; look first at whether you were really executing it at a high level, because more often than not that's where the breakdown actually lives.