Does progress seem slower when you constantly check on it? [View all]

Research on how we perceive the rate of change shows how you can be strategic about goal tracking and boost your motivation

https://psyche.co/ideas/does-progress-seem-slower-when-you-constantly-check-on-it


Photo by John Vizcaino/Reuters



Suppose you just started training for a marathon. You’ve never done anything like this before, but you’re hoping that seeing improvements in your fitness levels will motivate you to be a more active and healthier person. The marathon is a year away, and you have plenty of time to reach your desired condition. Of course, that also means you could lose steam between now and then – especially if you don’t feel like you’re getting better. So, measuring your progress seems critical. What’s the best way to go about doing that?

Running is just one of many contexts where the way you gauge progress matters. Other examples could be tracking how much money you’re saving for a much-needed vacation; how many pages of a paper, book or script you’ve written; or how much ground your team is covering on an important project at work. In these and other cases, underestimating or overestimating the pace of change can cause you trouble: misjudge how quickly you’re actually saving money, for example, and your dream vacation will stay a dream, perhaps indefinitely.

Sometimes, an accurate perception of change is essential. And in some contexts, just the feeling that change is happening quickly (or slowly) is important. If you don’t see satisfactory improvements in your running times, your spirits may start to dwindle. In fact, studies show a link between how fast or slow a person feels they’re progressing towards a goal and their motivation to continue. In any case, a key question is how closely you should be watching your running times, your savings, etc – that is, how frequently you should monitor progress. If you want to make an accurate judgment of how progress is going, it seems intuitive that frequent monitoring would help. On the other hand, popular wisdom suggests that watching too intently can distort your sense of how quickly or slowly something is proceeding: as the saying goes: ‘A watched pot never boils.’

My collaborators and I wanted to find out how the frequency of monitoring actually affects perceptions of change. In a recent study, we placed people in a managerial role at an imagined factory, where they tracked how many items some employees produced over a certain period. One employee was monitored daily, while another was monitored only every few days. Crucially, both employees produced items at the same rate. This means that the frequently monitored employee had less to show each time they were checked on, since less time had passed. At the end of the simulation, we measured the study participants’ impressions of each employee. As we suspected, our participants believed that the more-frequently monitored employee had been less productive, and they predicted that this employee would produce less than their co-worker over the following two days.

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