Score your weekly execution
Rate the percentage of planned actions you completed each week, and aim high.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Rate the percentage of planned actions you completed each week, and aim high.
- Why it works: A weekly execution score makes effort visible and accountable when the result is still invisible. Because lead behaviors precede outcomes, a consistently high execution score is the earliest reliable signal that the cycle is on track — it turns "did I do the work" into a number you cannot rationalize away.
- Evidence: Backed by observational / correlational evidence.
- Avoid: Scoring execution but never acting on a low number, so the metric becomes a guilt ritual instead of a trigger to re-plan.
Why it works
A weekly execution score makes effort visible and accountable when the result is still invisible. Because lead behaviors precede outcomes, a consistently high execution score is the earliest reliable signal that the cycle is on track — it turns "did I do the work" into a number you cannot rationalize away.
How to do it
- 1At week’s end, calculate the share of planned actions you actually completed.
- 2Treat a high execution score as the goal in itself during the cycle.
- 3Diagnose a low score: was the plan unrealistic, or did execution slip?
What the evidence says
ObservationalSelf-monitoring and progress feedback are reliably linked to better goal attainment; a weekly execution score operationalizes that into a single tracked number. The specific scoring practice is Moran’s framework, built on the monitoring principle.
Honest caveat: A high execution score on the wrong actions still fails; the score measures consistency, not whether the plan was correct.
- — Harkin et al. (2016), progress monitoring improves goal attainment (underlying principle)
Common mistake
Scoring execution but never acting on a low number, so the metric becomes a guilt ritual instead of a trigger to re-plan.
IX Coach tallies your weekly execution for you and, when the number drops, helps you diagnose whether the plan or the follow-through was the problem.
Practice this with IX Coach →