Weston Ludeke

I’ve had big dreams and lofty goals for as long as I can remember. But for years I struggled with the most important part: turning those ambitions into results. It wasn’t until I spent nearly a decade experimenting with habits, discipline, and goal tracking that I developed a system that works.

In this article, I’ll share the key lessons I’ve learned along my journey and how they helped me build self-discipline to tackle goals like learning to code and mastering a foreign language. I’ll also introduce an open-source app I built to simplify tracking daily progress, which you can use to customize to fit your goals.

The Power of Forming Habits

In 2013, I discovered the magic of consistent daily habits through Duolingo, the language learning app. Duolingo’s streak tracking system, which it pairs with playful gamification and daily reminders to complete a lesson, made it easy and even a bit addictive to show up daily for a quick language lesson.

This simple system taught me an essential truth: showing up daily is the foundation of forming habits and building discipline. It was my first step toward understanding how consistency drives progress to accomplish goals.

Over time I eventually became to realize that tracking and maintaining a daily streak of my goals isn’t enough on its own to make real progress. Showing up daily is important, but meaningful progress requires more than just consistency. It requires showing up for enough time each day to make a real impact to accomplish any ambitious goal.

From Tracking Streaks to Tracking Consistency Over Time

A few years after discovering Duolingo, I came across Coach.me, an app that helped me track the days I worked on my goals. Unlike Duolingo, Coach.me doesn’t just track unbroken streaks, it provides reports showing how consistently I am working towards a goal over weeks, months, and even years. This was a game-changer for my understanding of self-discipline.

I realized that while goal streaks can be motivating, they only tell part of the story. What matters isn’t maintaining an unbroken streak but showing up consistently over the long term, even if that includes taking a day off to rest or handle life’s unexpected challenges.

For example, if I studied Spanish for 350 out of 365 days in a year, Duolingo’s focus of only tracking my streak of consecutive days might show just a “7-day streak”. The problem with only tracking the goal’s streak is it overlooks the bigger picture: I showed up nearly every day and only took a small number of rest days, which still reflects a strong commitment toward accomplishing my goal. Coach.me helped me see this higher-level view of my progress, and it changed how I approached goal tracking.

This shift in perspective made me rethink my approach. I stopped obsessing over perfect streaks and focused instead on sustainable, long-term consistency.

Don’t Just Show Up, Spend the Time

By late 2018, I realized tracking the days I showed up and worked on each goal wasn’t enough. While Coach.me helped me stay consistent, I wasn’t making meaningful progress in learning to code. To make real progress, I needed to track how much time I spent on my daily goals.

I started using the stopwatch app on my phone to measure the time I spent actively studying programming. If I got distracted or stepped away, I paused the timer. At the end of each session, I logged the minutes in a simple Google Sheet to visualize my efforts. This was a game-changer! For the first time, I could see the reality of my commitment, and it was humbling. I realized I had been spending only small pockets of time each day, far less than I needed to make real progress.

It became clear that while showing up daily was important, spending just 15–20 minutes wasn’t enough to move the needle. I needed to dedicate more time each day. With this new focus, I set daily time targets for my goals. Armed with my stopwatch and spreadsheet, I began tracking my progress on the Sheet.

Leveling Up

Tracking the number of minutes I spent on my goals transformed my productivity. Seeing cumulative time across days, weeks, months, and years motivated me to invest more effort and make measurable progress.

I was still learning to code and doubted I’d ever be able to get past the basics, but tracking the number of minutes gave me a new perspective. I told myself that if I consistently studied for a few hours each day, the difficult programming concepts I was trying to learn would eventually become easier. Even if it took hundreds of hours, the effort would add up… and it did!

To help me track my progress at a high level, I added some simple weekly and monthly summaries to the Google Sheet, along with separate tabs for each year. This structure let me analyze trends in my progress, offering both a detailed view of daily habits and a broader perspective on long-term growth.

This system not only kept me disciplined but also helped me visualize how small, consistent efforts could lead to significant results over time.

Rapidly Advancing

Tracking my daily minutes since 2018 radically transformed how I approach my goals and helped me make exponential progress in the following years. When I began studying software engineering at Launch School in 2019, I used my spreadsheet to stay disciplined and focused. My discipline spreadsheet became crucial for me to maintain progress on my studies, as I was learning to code during my nights and weekends while balancing a full-time job at a fast-paced startup. Launch School recommends students study for a minimum of 15-20 hours per week, and the sheet helped keep me on track through the years of study through the program.

After 1,718 hours of deliberate practice over 3.5 years, I completed Launch School’s rigorous core curriculum in 2023. Without my time-tracking method, I doubt I could have managed such a demanding program alongside my work schedule.

I’ve also applied this approach to learning Spanish to advance past the beginner stage. While I couldn’t dedicate as much time to Spanish as I did to coding, I still prioritized showing up consistently and for enough time each day to make a decent amount of progress. Using tools like Dreaming Spanish, I tracked my progress on my spreadsheet and rapidly improved my listening skills, advancing significantly after just 100 hours of focused study.

Turning My Discipline Tracking Method Into an Open-Source App

Fast forward to today, and I’ve taken my goal-tracking system to the next level. In my current role as a Developer Relations Engineer at Pythagora, I’ve been using our AI-powered engineering tool to build personal projects. I decided it would be cool to see if I could use Pythagora to build a full-stack app to track discipline, essentially recreating my Google Sheet and Coach.me into one application.

After 2000+ lines of code and 36 files, the Discipline Tracker app is now available for anyone who wants to use it. The app allows users to add any goal they wish to track, and add in the number of minutes spent working on the goal each day. The app also contains reporting so you can visualize your progress for the week as well as for the entire year. There’s also a streak calendar so you can visualize how frequently you’ve worked on a goal over time.

This isn’t a commercial app, and I’m not selling anything, so you’ll need to clone to repo and run the code locally (instructions are in the README). The codebase is open-source, so feel free to clone the repo and modify the code to your liking. The repo can be viewed here.

If you’re interested in seeing the app in action, I published a short demo video below (or click this direct link here):

Final Thoughts

“A vision without a plan is just a hallucination.” – Earl Stevens

Ambition and goals are a great starting point, but simply dreaming about success isn’t enough. To accomplish anything meaningful, you need a clear plan, a tremendous amount of self-discipline, and a reliable system to track your progress over the long haul.

The past decade has taught me that achieving big goals requires patience, consistency, and the willingness to learn from mistakes. I’ve shared my journey and the tools I’ve developed in the hope that they’ll help you skip some of the trial and error I went through. Whether you start with a simple spreadsheet or give the Discipline Tracker app a try, the key is to begin tracking your efforts today. Progress is built one day—and one minute—at a time. Good luck out there!