Quarterly Achievement Calendars: Project Tracking, Team Accountability, and Opportunities for Celebration

Quarterly Achievement Calendars align teams, inspire an achievement mindset, and create opportunities to celebrate success.

Project management software is an outstanding tool for organizing, executing, and monitoring projects. It helps teams streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, improve resource allocation, and track progress, ultimately leading to the successful and timely completion of projects within budget and to the desired quality. 

But there’s more to it than meets the eye, and the benefits are worth exploring in more depth. Further, your organization might not have project management software available, so a simple Excel spreadsheet can often go a long way in achieving those same results—and then some. . .

Achievement Mindset

First, understand that your job as a manager is to (1) focus on your own deliverables as an individual contributor and (2) tend to the care and feeding of your staff. The order of the two responsibilities is deliberate: most managers focus on their own work first and then, depending on the time left over, dedicate themselves to managing their staff. And while that order might not be ideal (since as a manager, you primarily get work done through your people rather than individually, which compounds your return-on-investment to your company), it’s practical and real. After all, managers come from being “individual contributors” first, and many relate to the concept of “individual deliverables” naturally.

What’s critical in all cases as a manager, however, is that you focus your team on achievements. An achievement mindset comes first and foremost by building your team members’ self-confidence. When employees have a lot of self-confidence working for a particular leader, that person often becomes “the best boss they’ve ever had.” Why? To quote poet Maya Angelou loosely, “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget the way you made them feel.”

Next, talk about “bullets” versus “commas” with your staff. Bullets are hard-core achievements that you can add to your bio, resume, LinkedIn profile, or annual self-review. They’re typically linked to increased revenue, decreased expenses, improved customer satisfaction, or saved time. They can likewise develop from special projects and stretch assignments that were completed successfully within the quarter. However you look at it, “bullets” are accomplishments that can be quantified, that are evident to others, and that move the needle in terms of team, departmental, or organizational growth and development.

“Commas,” in comparison, are simply about going through the motions. Picture the person who describes their work as “creating correspondence, answering phones, administering filing,” and the like. That type of “comma mindset” typically finds ways of not getting work done, gets lost in details, suffers from analysis paralysis, or places blame on others when things get bogged down in bureaucracy. Quarterly achievements calendars are all about bullets, not commas, which is why they're particularly useful in aligning teams, fostering collaboration, assigning responsibility, and codifying team achievements.

This topic of “bullet vs. comma thinking” is easy enough to discuss with your staff so that people understand what you—the department head or team leader—value. Specifically, you can address how and why codifying hard-core accomplishments is and remains your primary goal. How you want to build people’s self-confidence so they can do their very best work every day with peace of mind. How you care about your people’s career and professional development and want them to experience success in their roles. And how you hope to pay forward your brand of leadership so they can see how simple tools work well to foster a sense of inclusion and belonging. It all comes down to your character and caring. What you value, prioritize, and celebrate should be shared with your staffers so that no one comes from fear of making mistakes, feels like they’re working in a vacuum, or otherwise lacks the ongoing support from you—their manager—when it comes to building new muscle or grooving new neural pathways in the ever-changing world of work.

Likewise, when it comes to goal setting, ask your employees what interests them personally at this point in their career and how you can help them develop a goal around that particular career- related area. Special projects and stretch assignments are healthy engagements that lead to goal development and attainment. While you can’t build goals solely around a particular team member’s career interests, you can certainly encourage individuals to set one goal (of several) that will help benefit them in terms of their career and professional development. Harvard Business Review’s book On Teams calls this “job sculpting,” which refers to the process of tailoring or shaping one's job to better align with that person’s individual strengths, preferences, and values. The basic assumption is that individuals can find greater job satisfaction and fulfillment by proactively shaping or customizing their roles within the organization. Their achievement mindset should subsequently grow, and their success profile rise when they're excelling at something that's particularly meaningful to them.

Project Tracking Using the Quarterly Achievement Calendar Tool  

A quarterly achievement calendar is a project tracking one-sheet that helps everyone keep an eye on the concrete deliverables and goals they’ve set. Whether in the form of a project management database or a simple Excel spreadsheet on your employees’ share drive, it gives everyone a landing page to document and codify their accomplishments. It helps everyone on the team feel more aligned and in sync with what your department or team is focusing on because everyone has equal access to the information. Asking staff members to provide weekly updates prior to your weekly team meeting keeps everyone aligned and focused. Even more importantly, it enables monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting better than just about anything else because your team is capturing their achievements throughout the year in real time. And don't forget the added benefit of eliminating the sense of entitlement that team members sometimes experience when one individual assumes that “they're doing all the work around here,” while others aren't holding their own. Physically seeing their peers' projects and accomplishments typically eliminates those sorts of short-minded assumptions before they fester into resentment and create job dissatisfaction.

When staff members see what their peers are working on, they’re less inclined to complain that they carry the majority of the workload. They also gain a healthy view of your department’s key priorities and initiatives so they don’t feel like they’re working in isolation. Completed projects then give you the opportunity to highlight your staff members’ achievements: “Sara, we’re so proud of you. This is great! Do tell. . .  We want to learn from you and hear all about how you managed this project through to completion. Also, let us know what obstacles you faced and how you’ve had to pivot in order to cross the finish line. What were some of the key lessons you walked away with, and how can we benefit as a team from your experience?” 

Recognition for a job well done is the psychic income that binds people to their company and to their immediate boss—even more so than raises and promotions. When people feel like they’re thriving in their role, their boss has their back, and they’re called on to become subject matter experts in their disciplines, they thrive. And when they’re “hitting on all cylinders” and are otherwise feeling like they’re at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy in terms of career fulfillment, they likely won’t leave for a twenty percent raise at a competitor company--even if a headhunter tries to lure them away.

Further, be sure to involve your team in creating the reporting tool itself. You can use the template that’s listed below as a starting point. But have your team come up with additional suggestions and recommendations. It will not only make the tool that much more effective; it will likewise ensure that your employees feel more inclined to use the tool and reporting process since they were instrumental in developing its format.

Logistics

What’s key to the successful use of a Quarterly Achievement Calendar is consistency. Everyone is responsible for updating their entries in the spreadsheet/database once per week before your team’s weekly staff meeting. This way, the calendar can be used to lead discussions, ask questions, resolve roadblocks, and escalate matters that require additional resources from outside the team unit or department.

Timewise, it doesn’t typically take long for your team members to update an average of three to five entries that they’re responsible for. (You can increase that number over time, but start slowly when launching a tool like this to ensure that everyone feels comfortable and confident with it over time.) Remember, it’s their responsibility to update the log—not yours—and it likely will take them less than 30 minutes per week, depending on the complexity of the tasks they’re working on. Even better, once a project is complete, you can simply cut and paste it to a new worksheet within that same spreadsheet that's labeled “Completed Projects.”  This way, you’re tracking your department’s or team’s achievements throughout the year and have much more accurate information regarding your team’s performance come annual performance review time.

Three worksheet tabs within the master spreadsheet can be titled as follows:

1.    Current Projects

2.    Completed Projects

3.    Legend

Again, if you have project management software, this will all be built into the bundle. If not, though, here’s how to map out your Quarterly Achievement Calendar in spreadsheet form:

Tab 1: Current Projects

	Employee	Project	Date Began	Date Due	Stakeholders
	Derek
1		HR Strategic Planning PowerPoint	4/1/2025	5/1/2025	Paul (VPHR) + Full Team
2		Team 1-on-1 review of updated job description for submission.	5/25/2025	6/15/2025	Sandra + Maria
3		Launch of operational leadership training workshops on performance management & leadership development.	5/31/2025	9/30/2025	Janet (VP L&D) + Derek
	Sandra
1
2
3
	Maria
1
2
3

(Table 1 continued)

Priority Level	Legend Code	Status Narrative	Date Completed	Special Notes
High	Urgent	Team feedback underway for initial submission to Paul on 5/1. Paul to review by 5/15.
Medium	On Track	Individual job descriptions to be reviewed by 6/10 for submission to Paul on 6/15.
Low	On Track	Two initial programs' content is 90% complete and being vetted by Legal. Q4 rollout on track.

Tab 2: Completed Projects

The Completed Projects tab is the same as the extended table above. However, the “Date Completed” column should now appear in yellow highlight (rather than the “Status Narrative” column) since you're measuring the timing of the completed projects. This way, the identical heading format makes it simple transfer the entry from “Tab 1: Current Projects” to “Tab 2: Completed Projects.”

Tab 3: Legend

The legend is simply the priority coding that you use to denote each project, assignment, or initiative underway. It might look like this:

Priority Level	Status Label	Color Code	Meaning
High	Urgent	Red	Immediate attention required; risk to timeline or deliverables.
Medium	Due Now	Yellow	Task is due today/this week; action needed.
Low	At Risk	Tan	Potential issues identified; needs monitoring or intervention.
	On Track	Green	Actively being worked on; within timeline. All is going as planned.
	Not Started	Grey	Task has not yet begun; scheduled for later | specific date.
	On Hold	Purple	Temporarily paused due to dependency, decision, or external factors.
	Blocked	Dark Red	Cannot proceed; awaiting input or resolution of issue.
	Cancelled	Blue	Task/project no longer proceeding; officially withdrawn.
	Completed	Black	Time to celebrate!

Note that you’ll want to keep this calendar short and tight. No long details or explanations are needed; one to two sentences per project should be all that’s required. Beyond that, discuss updates verbally during your 1-on-1 and weekly staff meetings.

Likewise, your boss (department head) should have access to this spreadsheet on the share drive so they can review in real time the status of various projects that your team is working on. In cases where your boss has to cancel your 1-on-1 weekly meeting at the last minute, they can simply refer to the project spreadsheet for a quick look at the status of your team’s projects and call you with any questions. Also, note that modern cloud-based share drives allow for collaborative editing and co-authoring, but the file locking mechanism and co-authoring features must be properly configured for multiple users to edit files simultaneously. Speak with your IT team if you require technical support in these areas.

Tracking projects and goals keeps everyone’s eye focused on the most significant activities that your department or team is involved in at any given time. Quarterly Achievement Calendars tend to cut through the clutter and keep everyone on point. They help staff meetings move along more smoothly and avoid going down rabbit holes. And they give your boss more self-confidence in terms of understanding what their direct (you) and extended (your team) reports are working on.

Likewise, employ the Quarterly Achievement Calendar to track and celebrate successes. Make it easy for the team to see everyone’s progress on the “Completed Accomplishments” tab and celebrate wins (i.e., project completions). And don't be surprised to see a little "competitive spirit" develop as individuals and teams partner together to deliver results on that Completed Projects tab. Further, use the tool to anchor your staff meetings and place individual members of your team into rotational leadership roles where they use it to lead meetings and follow up by assuming responsibility for challenges raised during those working sessions.

It’s really a simple, ‘back-of-the-napkin” exercise to formalize status updates, role clarity, timeliness, identification and resolution of barriers, and opportunities to demonstrate “pride in ownership” via documented achievements and accomplishments. Quarterly Achievement Calendars work especially well with remote teams too. So, start small, share your logic for creating this tool, and use the process itself as a way of supporting your employees’ career and professional development efforts. “Growing talent,” after all, remains one of your core deliverables as a manager—no matter how busy you are with your own individual work. Become that leader who’s focused, deliberate, thoughtful, and open to suggestion. Your employees will feel heard, experience being part of something bigger than themselves, and take pride in adding “achievement bullets” to the team’s spreadsheet and their own resumes and LinkedIn profiles.

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