A shared universe › Blog › The value of small steps forward · Español
If you feel you are getting nowhere, you are most likely moving forward, but in steps so small you don’t see them. Noting down one step each day, however tiny, helps you see them, and studies suggest that keeping track of your own progress brings the goal closer. When the goal is far away, it is easy to feel that you are not moving forward. And yet you almost always are: it is just that the steps are so small they cannot be seen.
The researcher Teresa Amabile, of Harvard Business School, has studied everyday work through diaries. In one of her studies, published in 2005 with Sigal Barsade, Jennifer Mueller and Barry Staw, she gathered the diaries that 222 employees of seven companies wrote at the end of each working day, and found that the days of better mood were also the days of more new ideas, even a day or two later.
Later, together with the researcher Steven Kramer, she summed up what she had learned from the diaries of this kind of worker in a simple idea: what motivates most is being able to take a step forward each day in work that matters. They called it the progress principle.
We look at what is missing, not at the ground covered. And small steps don’t seem worth mentioning: a call made, a paragraph written, one more day without smoking. But those are the ones that lead somewhere.
Besides, when a goal matters a great deal, anything short of reaching it seems like little. Someone studying for a competitive exam, recovering from an injury or trying to get through a bad patch can spend weeks feeling they are standing still, when in fact they have been gaining ground.
In 2016 Benjamin Harkin and seven other researchers brought together 138 experiments with almost twenty thousand people to see whether paying attention to your own progress helps you reach a goal. The answer was yes: people who were encouraged to keep track of how they were doing got closer to their goals.
The effect was greater when progress was recorded physically, on paper or in a log, and when it was shared with others. Seeing what you have done is not a consolation prize: it is part of what lets you carry on. That is why noting your steps in a notebook, or telling someone you trust about them, can be more useful than it seems.
There will be days when everything seems to come undone: a relapse, an exam that goes badly, a week with no energy. They don’t erase the ground covered. Looking back at what you have noted down over the weeks helps you see that a bad day is one day, not the summary of everything.
If the stumble has been a big one, you may find it useful to read about starting again after a failure. And if the hard part is that the result is taking so long, about patience, which can be learned too.
Sometimes feeling that you are getting nowhere has more to do with your mood than with the path. If for weeks you have felt like doing nothing, stopped enjoying what you used to like or felt that nothing makes sense, mention it to your GP or to a psychologist. Asking for help is a step too.
If you have lit a star in A shared universe with something you hope for, you can come back and say how it is going, with phrases like “I’m a little better today” or “It went well”. You will have one more step in front of you.
And if what you were hoping for arrives, you can say thank you: your star will turn golden. Each star shines for seven days, and you can keep it lit for another seven while you are still on your way.