Small Wins, Big Results: The Power of Daily Tracking

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Table of Contents

Podcast Description

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when big goals seem out of reach. In today’s episode, I’m sharing how to track small wins in business and break down your goals into manageable, daily steps.

You’ll learn actionable strategies for goal-setting for entrepreneurs that keep you motivated and moving forward to start building momentum and achieving your dreams, one small win at a time!

Links Referenced in Episode:

▶ Productive Entrepreneurs Club

▶ Daily Stat Tracker (Trello Template)

Connect with me:

Website | Instagram

Episode Transcript

(Note: This is a formatted AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through, but is not an optimized blog post. Please excuse any spelling or grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, your host of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast, where I’m on a mission to help online entrepreneurs like you focus on all the right things and kiss overwhelm goodbye. Here, you’re going to learn strategies that will boost your productivity so that you can scale your online biz and impact lives sooner. It’s your time to shine. So let’s get started!

Hey hey, welcome back to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast! Alright, we’re in February, and this is typically the time when our goals start going out the window. We’re shifting our plans yet again, and it seems to happen every single year. This year has definitely been no different, and it’s been a lot more mentally and emotionally draining, at least on my end.

So, let’s talk about how we can shift from feeling like we’re not making enough progress toward our big goals. Let’s be real—sometimes we might not even know what those goals are anymore, or they just keep changing over and over again. So instead, let’s talk about how tracking small wins every single day can actually lead to those big results you want over time. And right now, in this moment, it feels a lot less overwhelming to just focus on that one next step.

What can I do today? What is the next tiny action I can take? Because, honestly, I can’t even handle doing these big, massive five-year plans. I can’t even think about what I’m going to be doing in Q3 or Q4, because it’s definitely going to look a lot different than it does right now.

So, let’s talk about focusing on those small wins. What this really means is that you’re just focusing on that next step. You’re not thinking about, you know, I want to reach… let’s say you want to reach your first 1,000 email subscribers. That goal might seem super unachievable. Maybe you’ve started Facebook ads, and your goal with Facebook ads is to get, let’s say, 200 email subscribers per month. That seems like a far stretch. So instead of focusing on that big number that feels so far away, focus on what you can do every single day. Break it down into those small goals and celebrate those small wins.

Even if you get just one subscriber, well, hey, that’s one person closer to your 200 or 1,000 goal, right? So really focus on these small wins. But more than that, you really want to make sure you’re tracking those small wins, because it helps you create a sense of progress and achievement.

It’s almost like habit tracking. When you’re tracking your habits, like making sure you drink your water every morning, or whatever other habits you might be working on. It’s the same concept, but with your goals. And instead of tracking those big, huge goals—which yes, you still want to keep in mind—let’s break them down into some daily bite-sized steps.

By breaking them down into these bite-sized steps, you’re taking something that feels way too far away and unattainable and making it feel so much smaller, more manageable, and achievable. And not just that—whenever you’re tracking these small wins on a daily basis, those actions are eventually going to add up to significant progress toward your bigger goal. It’s giving you a visual. You’re seeing firsthand what you’ve done every single day.

Not only are you seeing what you’ve achieved every single day, but by tracking everything on a daily basis, you’re giving yourself the ability to also take some notes on what may have helped you achieve that number or that little small win. Maybe it was nothing, maybe there was one day where you didn’t get any email subscribers, and now you can reflect because it’s fresh in your mind.

You can say, “Okay, I didn’t get any subscribers. Did I even do anything yesterday that could’ve potentially helped me get more subscribers?” Honestly, sometimes for me, the answer is no. My notes might say, “I didn’t have any sale going on, I didn’t send any emails, I didn’t post on social media, I didn’t record a podcast episode.” And then it clicks. That’s why. It’s almost like the validation, like, “Okay, there’s nothing wrong with me or my business. I didn’t do what I needed to do to make this small goal, or even to get that one new subscriber.”

So not only does this start to help you make that bigger goal feel more manageable and achievable, but it also helps you stay accountable. You’ll hold yourself accountable to what you are or aren’t doing to help you achieve that goal. And if you do have any small wins to celebrate, now you’re celebrating them and making note of how you achieved them.

For example, let’s say you gained two email subscribers, and you realize it was from Instagram stories. Now you know that Instagram stories are helping. What do you do? You can do more—you can share more Instagram stories. Likewise, if you go five days posting Instagram stories and you don’t see results, that’s in your notes. You can assess whether you want to continue trying this for the recommended time of 90 days, or if it’s taking up too much of your time.

Is it really hard for you? You can start to assess in real-time how you’re feeling about the things you’re doing and if they seem to be working or not.

Let me throw in this caveat: There are a lot of things that you’ll need to do consistently for a longer period of time, and I don’t recommend changing everything just because you don’t see results in one week. But by keeping track of these notes while they’re fresh in your head, you’ll have more data to reference back to when it’s time to assess whether something is working or not.

So really, these small wins that you’re tracking every single day will eventually add up to significant progress toward your bigger goal. Or it will give you some amazing insight into what has been working and what hasn’t been working.

Okay, inside of the Productive Entrepreneurs Club, I actually just uploaded a brand new resource—the “Goal-to-Habit Roadmap,” which is really this concept of breaking down your bigger goal and putting it into bite-sized habits that can help you reach that goal a lot easier. So, you can join us inside the Productive Entrepreneurs Club for just $7 a month. Head to cheerstoproductivity.com/club to grab that resource and everything else that’s inside.

Okay, so here’s what I want you to do: Pick one thing. Just pick that one thing to track today, and see how it feels. Tracking doesn’t need to be overwhelming. It can be as simple as just tracking one thing a day. It can be the daily sales that you’re getting. It can be the number of email subscribers. It can be the number of Instagram followers.

It can be whatever thing that you want to focus on, that you’ve been trying to grow. Just pick that one thing and track it every single day. As I mentioned, take note of the number, but also some quick notes: What did you do that may have caused this number, whether it’s a good one or a bad one?

If you want a simpler way to do this, I’ve created a brand new Daily Stats Tracker Trello template to make it super easy to track your small wins every single day. This is the exact template I’ve been using myself for quite some time now, where I personally like to track my daily sales, the number of email subscribers, and the revenue that I’m getting from my platforms—both Thrivecart and Shopify.

So I’m tracking all of those numbers every single day, and yeah, I’m keeping notes of it. I have it mapped out, ready to go for the whole month. I have some automations in there to make it so much easier. I’m telling you, this process takes me less than five minutes to do every morning. Probably two minutes tops per day, and it’s so, so insightful.

I’m going to drop that link in the show notes if you want to check it out to make it easy for you to track multiple stats. But honestly, just start. If you do anything, if you take away anything from this episode, it’s to just start tracking and see how it feels.

This template and this process are really just designed to make it so much easier for you to track your small wins and become more efficient at it. But even just the habit of tracking in general, no matter how you may do that—whether on paper, another tool, or however you want to track it—is all going to help you stay consistent with doing the thing you’re trying to do and achieve the goal you’re trying to achieve.

Also, you’ll start to see that what you’re doing matters. Literally. What you’re doing not only matters from a purpose standpoint, but also the tasks you’re doing, the actions you’re taking on a day-to-day basis—they matter. And if your actions aren’t lining up with the goals, then you’ve got some work to do. But you won’t know unless you start tracking this information.

So definitely just start—pick something, track it, and grab the template if you want to make it easier for you. Start celebrating your daily wins, no matter how small they may seem.

Alright, I’ll talk to you in the next episode!

Thank you so much for listening to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast with me, Lucy Reyes. To view the full transcript and all the links mentioned in today’s episode, visit cheerstoproductivity.com/podcast. And before you go, make sure you follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening so you know when the next productive chat is released. Talk soon, and cheers to your productivity and success!