<p>A growing body of evidence across psychology suggests that (cognitive) effort exertion increases in proximity to a goal state. For instance, previous work has shown that participants respond more quickly, but not less accurately, when they near a goal—as indicated by a filling progress bar. Yet it remains unclear <i>when</i> over the course of a cognitively demanding task do people monitor progress information: Do they continuously monitor their goal progress over the course of a task, or attend more frequently to it as they near their goal? To answer this question, we used eye-tracking to examine trial-by-trial changes in progress monitoring as participants completed blocks of an attentionally demanding oddball task. Replicating past work, we found that participants increased cognitive effort exertion near a goal, as evinced by an increase in correct responses per second. More interestingly, we found that the rate at which participants attended to goal progress information—operationalized here as the frequency of gazes towards a progress bar—increased steeply near a goal state. In other words, participants extracted information from the progress bar at a higher rate when goals were proximal (versus distal). In exploratory analysis of tonic pupil diameter, we also found that tonic pupil size increased sharply as participants approached a goal state, mirroring the pattern of gaze. These results support the view that people attend to progress information more as they approach a goal.</p>