Self monitoring is essential for achieving your goal. New behaviours have to be refined and cemented, this is done not only with self awareness but feedback as well. People in general are not really good at remembering things, accuracy of the past can be anywhere between 20-90% inaccurate no matter how confident you are so trying to recall off the top of your head how well you’ve stuck to your goal over the course of a month or so is not recommended.
It’s always going to be better to track as you go, for example if you decide to increase how much water you drink in a day but retro-track three days back it’s not likely you’ll have an accurate count of how much water you drank. Tracking provides a sense of ownership as well. If you’re trying to learn a new language using a phone app you might blame the app for being bad when you can’t speak the new language, but you track and notice you’ve only done 3 lessons in the last two weeks. This puts both the sense of failure on you when you don’t achieve your goals but also the sense of success is all yours as well, and a sense of success in yourself drives self efficacy higher than just achieving a goal. That sense of success in yourself and building self efficacy can create positive feedback loops that lead to more success.
Tracking alone seems to have positive benefits, wearing a fitness tracker watch increases physical activity for example (PMID: 26431257). You can identify what behaviors to track once you have your goal set, an example might be to be more fit. This is a pretty vague goal and not very trackable but that can be broken down into more tangible goals like I want to exercise 3 times per week and learn about resistance training. Now you have a trackable goal, you can set up a google calendar with your workouts scheduled, you can check them off as you go, also how many days per week you read a book about resistance training. If you notice you are missing the gym often you can start to note that down and identify what’s going on. Continuing the gym example you might notice your Fridays are super busy at work and stressful so you want to go home right after and spend time with friends to destress. This is completely fine. You could switch workout days and make Friday a rest day.
Change doesn’t happen overnight for anybody achieving big goals takes time. People lose motivation when they perceive no progress, you might have a goal of walking to work instead of driving but just because you drove to work doesn’t mean you’re not walking to work more often. Tracking can reveal gradual changes over time, so make sure you are taking the time to set yourself up for success.