. . .is the prelude to progress. *
Last week–was it only last week?–I posted about some of the organizational tools I have used to try to keep up with my Hydra-Headed To Do list. At that point, I suggested somebody remind me to talk about the progress bars I used recently with a group of friends. Well, y’all fell down on the job, and nobody reminded me, but I’m going to talk about them anyway! So there.
You know what I mean when I say, “progress bar,” don’t you?
Every time you load some software, you see one. If you’ve ever participated in a school fundraising drive, you’ve seen one. (That thermometer that rises as the money rolls in? That’s what I mean.)
Back in November, for about 3 months, I made the most incredible progress on a variety of fronts because of some progress bars.
I had a few tasks that could be quantified–like editing a certain number of pages, writing a couple of chapters of my upcoming book, accomplishing 12 tasks of tax preparation. Things like that.
I found some nifty HTML code that allowed me to create a progress bar, and then I noodled with it and changed the colors and added glittering animated gifs when the bar reached 100%.
They looked something like this, with a countdown timer to display how much time before the end of the month, and some progress bars to show how close I was getting to meeting the goals. (Please note: Any resemblance to any actual goals, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)
This is not a perfect implementation of this idea. For one thing, I have to manually calculate the percentage of progress as I go along and edit the page. But as a beginning pass at it, it was a whiz-bang!
Why was it a whiz-bang?
Because it was incredibly effective!
Stuff like editing, which I hate? I sailed through it. I’d do a couple of pages, and instead of quitting, I’d think, If I do a few more, I get to move the bar along a little more! And I’d keep going!
At one point, I had ten or fifteen progress bars going, and I was just watching those colors move farther and farther right and those glittery butterflies flutter. It was a game. Much more fun than checking things off or crossing them out.
If you’d like to add a similar progress bar to your own website, you can find a code generator here. If you prefer a vertical, fundraising thermometer-type thing, this might be a good jumping off point.
If you’re technically-challenged, there are always paper and stickers and crayons. The point is. . .a visual representation of your progress, interactive in some way, even if it’s just gold stars, can make a huge difference!
