Great Tools to Keep Track of Your Goals

Setting specific, measurable, time-bound goals isn’t enough. You have to keep track of your goals in order to make sure that you’re making adequate progress toward achieving them.  Below you’ll find some tools you can use to help you keep track of your goals so that you’re not just setting and forgetting them.

Track Your Goals With Joe’s Goals

Joe’s Goals is a simple, free, very effective online tool you can use to keep track of your goals and habits.  It consists of a grid with the seven days of the week along the top, and habits you want to adopt or drop listed to the side.

Suppose you’ve set the following ten positive goals/habits:

• Wake up at 7:00 a.m.
• Drink water as soon as you get up.
• Make the bed.
• Meditate/visualize for 15 minutes.
• Eat breakfast; make sure it includes protein and fiber.
• Get a half hour of exercise.
• Eat 3 servings of fruit.
• Eat 5 servings of vegetables.
• Write down 5 things you’re grateful for.
• Be in bed by 11:30 p.m.

In addition, you’ve decided to kick the following 5 bad habits:

• Eating fast food (Mc Donald’s, KFC, Burger King, and so on).
• Eating a sugary snack in the afternoon (donut, bear claw, bag of M&M’s, and so on).
• Drinking coffee after 2:00 p.m.
• Smoking.
• Drinking soda.

All 15 habits would be listed along the left.

Every day, for every positive habit you carry out, you get a green checkmark and one point.  For every negative habit you indulge in for that day, you get a red checkmark and you get a point deducted. At the end of the day your points are tallied and you get a daily score. The objective is to improve your score as much as you can. Turn it into a game!

StickK – Create a Commitment Contract and Put Money On the Line

Have you tried over and over again to achieve certain goals–such as losing weight, kicking your smoking habit, and becoming an early riser–, to no avail? If so, then StickK may be just what you’re looking for.

StickK is based on the principle that the two most important keys to achieving goals is creating incentives and assigning accountability. It was founded by Dean Karlan, an Economics professor at Yale University, Ian Ayres, a Law professor at Yale University, and Jordan Goldberg, a student from the Yale School of Management.

The program uses “Commitment Contracts”. Years of rigorous academic research conducted by the founders of StickK have proven that using “Commitment Contracts” can more than triple your chances of successfully achieving your goals. The contracts, and the money you have to pay if you fail to follow through–more on this below–, make you stick to your word.

The process is simple. First, you register with the StickK web site, for free. Then you decide what goal you’re going to work on and you sign a contract committing yourself to achieving said goal within a particular time-frame. The next step is to decide if you’re going to commit money to your goal, and where you want that money to go if you don’t make adequate progress toward achieving your goal.

You can decide if your money goes to a friend, foe, charity, or “anti-charity”. What’s an anti-charity? It’s an organization you can’t stand, such as the NRA if you hate guns, or the Bush Library if you can’t stand Bush.  The idea is that you’ll probably work harder toward achieving your goal if you have to pay a cause you’re absolutely against if you fail to follow through. In other words, StickK is about putting your money where your mouth is.

Here’s An Example

Suppose you want to lose 12 pounds in three months and you’ve decided to wager $10 a week. StickK calculates that you need to lose a pound a week in order to reach your goal. So your goal is to lose a pound a week for the following 12 weeks. Each week you have to report on your progress (you report whether or not that week you lost one pound). If you don’t reach your goal on any particular week, or if you fail to report, StickK charges $10 to the credit card you submitted as part of the commitment process.

As long as you’re following through on your goal, you don’t pay a cent.  Therefore, you can even raise the stakes: how about committing $500 a week?  Is that donut worth $500?  If so, I’d like to take a look at that donut.

You could lie. Yes, you could. If you think you can’t be trusted to tell the truth–and like House, MD is fond of saying, “Everyone lies”–, you can assign a “referee” (a relative or a friend) to keep you honest. A referee is a third party who has to verify that you’re telling the truth.

If you choose to, you can post photos and videos and share your progress with other StickK users, join communities of others with similar goals, and so on. StickK also provides you with email reminders and a commitment journal to track your progress.

As an aside, if you’re the type of person who prefers a carrot instead of a stick, you can track your goals using TheCarrot.com.  In addition, for financial goals you can take a look at the web site Wesabe.

Good Old Fashioned Journal or Log Book

Instead of going online you can simply use a journal or a log book to keep track of your progress.  For example, if you’ve created a training program for yourself you can write down each day how much you exercised, what you ate, how much water you drank, and if you got enough sleep.  You can even include additional comments related to how you feel and any obstacles you might be facing.

Journaling is particularly good for goals that aren’t so straightforward or linear, such as keeping a positive attitude, improving your relationship with your co-workers, or raising your self-confidence.  You can use your journal not just to keep track of your goals, but also to work through your feelings and ideas surrounding that particular goal.

Conclusion

One of the main reasons why people fail to achieve their goals is because they don’t set up a way to monitor whether they’re taking the necessary action to achieve those goals.  The tools I wrote about above are just some of the ways in which you can keep track of your goals, there are many others.

How do you keep track of your goals?  Please share in the comments section.

(inside views of my daytimer and logbook photo courtesy of zak_greant.)

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe for free by RSS or e-mail and you’ll always know when I publish something new.

Related Articles:

• Life Evaluation: Are You Flunking Life?
• 99 Powerful Questions to Ask to Turbocharge Your Life
• 100 Essential Life Lessons
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Habit 1
• The Paint by Number Approach to Accomplishing Your Goals

I Recommend:

My ebook “How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists” explains that creativity is not the sole domain of the arts but is important in any field. Whatever you do, creativity helps you do it better. Discover practical advice on how to be more creative in every life endeavor by reading my ebook.

The Sedona Method is a simple, powerful, easy-to-learn technique that shows you how to let go of any negative, unwanted or painful feelings you may be experiencing at any particular moment. It consists of a series of questions you ask yourself that lead your awareness to focus on what you’re feeling in the moment and gently guide you toward letting it go. Read my review of the Sedona Method here.