Some examples:
How many times I could raise and lower my leg before being exhausted.
Number of steps I could take at a time.
Words I blocked on.
Number of times I became altogether unable to complete a sentence. (Though this was more approximate.)
Number of pushups I could do.
Distance I could walk.
Complexity of the hardest logic-puzzle I'd successfully solved.
How many words I could write before my hand was exhausted.
How coherently I could write (I still have somewhere a piece of paper on which I wrote the same sentence, over and over, on each line; it gradually morphs from a literally indecipherable scrawl to something indistinguishable from a normal-though-sloppy person's handwriting.)

These were, of course, at different times in my recovery.

Oh, and re: motivating... that's a much more difficult question to answer.

The charting techniques were "motivating" only in a prophylactic sense... they helped me resist a certain kind of "I'm not getting any better" despair that was otherwise very compelling and very demotivating.

Positive motivation to progress was much harder to come by, and I had a much less concrete grasp on it. I was often in a not quite apathetic, but highly disengaged state with respect to my recovery. Mostly I dealt with this by accepting it as just another intermittent deficit where I had to ride out the bad periods and take advantage of the good ones.

I think the closest I can come to describing it accurately is to say that motivation-to-progress was highly correlated with focus; when what I was doing was recovery, I was very motivated to make progress. What direction causality ran, though, I have no idea.