The whip and the carrot

Juju at The Skinny Daily, a weight loss blog, recommends writing, logging and charting as great and supportive tools in the process of managing a massive weight loss. I can verify that, I lost a lot of weight two years ago thanks to keeping a daily log according to Hackers Diet. It made me review my goals daily, track progress and most importantly, it reminded me to stick to my diet. If you don't use a log it's very easy to "forget" the times when you don't follow your plan. And not following your dieting plan is a type of procrastination.

I imagine that you can take this concept and use it on other measurable goals:

• Number of pages written every day on your bestselling book
• Lines of code programmed on that Open Source project
• Hours spent designing your award winning furniture

If logging is the whip, were is the carrot? When loosing weight the carrot is that you feel better and people tells you that you look thinner. In other scenarios you may have to set up rewards at certain milestones in your project.

Keeping a log of your progress (the whip) and reward yourself when you stick to the plan (the carrot) is an effective way to battle procrastination.