Whether you've made some resolutions for the new year or you're just looking for a tool that can help reinforce your commitment to making some positive changes in your life, the web is full of apps, tools, and web services designed to remind you that you're supposed to do something good for yourself, connect you with other people facing the same challenge, and provide encouragement. Here are five of the best of those services, based on your nominations.
Earlier in the week, we asked you which services you used to track your goals and monitor your progress towards them. You responded with more suggestions than we could possibly cover in one story, but we tallied the nominations and here are the top five.
Photo by Julie Jordan Scott.
Lifetick
Lifetick is one of the most robust and feature-rich goal-tracking webapps we've seen. The service is full of features that make it easy to add and track multiple goals, build plans and steps for each one, and then look back on your progress over time to see how well you're doing on the way there, complete with graphs and reports that quantify your experiences. You can filter your goals based on the part of your life you want to work on, and review your progress in each individual area. Lifetick is free if you're tracking up to 4 goals, but if you want to add more or make use of the service's journaling features, you'll have to pay $20/year for a subscription.
Mindbloom Life Game
The Mindbloom Life Game is not only fun, but it's a great way to prioritize the things that are important to you and make concrete strides towards improving those areas of your life. We've covered Mindbloom before, and the service has grown since then to offer more suggestions, roll in more social features to help you collaborate on your goals and share your progress with friends, and even an iPhone app to help you stay inspired and committed to your goals when you're away from your computer. The game rolls in rewards and incentives for working towards your goals, and while the goals aren't completely user-defined, they're all good improvements to make in your life. Plus, it's completely free.
Goalscape
Goalscape is up there with Lifetick when it comes to the number of features and reporting options it offers. The service arranges your goals in a large set of concentric "wheels," organized by type and with the relative importance of each goal indicated by how large a slice of the wheel it represents. You can easily see at all times which goals are bigger than the others, and you can separate them out by category to see how you're doing with each one. The service offers templates you can use to get started quickly, and reporting your progress is easy. You can download an AIR app for Mac OS or Windows, use the webapp to keep track of your goals, or take Goalscape on the go with its iPhone app. Goalscape is pricey though: it offers a 14-day free trial, but after that you'll need to cough up either $114 for the AIR app (which includes 6 months of access to the webapp, after which you'll have to pay again if you want to use the webapp), $114 for a 12-month subscription to the webapp alone, or $63 for a 6-month subscription to the webapp alone.
Milestone Planner
Milestone Planner is less oriented towards individuals looking to accomplish their personal goals as it is designed to help groups and individuals work on projects and tasks, but the tool is one of your favorites for both purposes. The drag-and-drop interface works well for organizing tasks, you can easily run a report to see when items are due and what's set to finish when, as well as your overall progress towards those milestones. If you have a goal with incremental steps?and your goals should definitely have measurable steps you can take along the way?Milestone Planner can remind you when to check on those steps, and how far you have to go. If you're organizing goals for a group, you can assign tasks and milestones to others, and get reports on how they're doing as well. The service has free "guest version," which limits you to 3 plans and is ad-supported, but for more plans and milestones you'll need to pay $14/month for the Pro Version, or ask for a quote for their enterprise suites.
Joe's Goals
Joe's Goals isn't terribly robust or full of flash and flare, but it's simple, easy to use, and earns more than a few points for being simple and to the point. Add your goals and the things you want to do regularly to a calendar, and then check off whether your met or missed your goal each day. The service was built by?predictably?Joe, who wanted a way to easily keep track of how often he worked out, but also how frequently he slipped up and ordered takeout, so he built a webapp to help him out. Joe's Goals works jsut as well with "positive" goals, like things you want to do, as it does with "negative" goals, or things you want to stop doing. You'll always be able to tell at a glance how well you're progressing, and you can add more than one check for days where you went the extra mile. Simple, effective, easy, and free.
Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to vote for the winner.
Honorable mentions this week go out to 43 Things, a service we love and one of the first web services to define this category, but surprinsgly was just shy of the nominations needed to make the top five. Also worth noting is the currently-in-beta Aherk!, which blackmails you into working towards your goals by threatening to post an embarrassing photo to Facebook for you if you don't.
Have something to say about one of the contenders? Miss the call for contenders thread and want to plead the case for your favorite? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/Qi9zU2wgDgQ/five-best-goal-tracking-services
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