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Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#101

Post by Viccco »

Any free soft is good for it. Even Notepad. The point is - a regular review is the key. To stick to your goals, you need to make sure that you are on the track.

For me it means to have every 6 months bigger review where I look what I've done past 6 months, which tasks done, which not and why. Then I select goals/tasks for the next 6 months.

Other kind of reviewing is every month or every week (depends on you) with subtask for every goals.

I'm using Workflowy as it's quite minimalistic

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#102

Post by wwhitlow »

nicostouch wrote: post #89
pixelmonkey wrote: post #45

Loop Habit Tracker for Android is the only thing that has ever worked for me for tracking goals -- and sticking to them. https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits Simple interface where you set your "habits" and how frequently per week you expect to do them. (E.g. exercise 4x per week, eat healthy 6x per week). Then you simply check off each day whether it happened. The analytics makes it clear if you are doing the right thi…

I'm putting together https://habitrabb.it as an alternative to Loop but addressing some of the issues people in Play store were complaining about. Still a WIP but Android version will come out soon and I'm currently in the process of majorly reworking the UX. Essentially the difference is people sometimes complained of losing a lot of data because no cloud backups and no iOS version hence i'm doing web+android+ios. A…

I was interested in comparing what you are building to the loop habit tracker that was linked in the parent but all you site has is a text description and a sign up link (at least on mobile). I'd recommend adding some images so people know what they are signing up for since we all have more accounts then we are aware of anyways...

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#103

Post by tonyedgecombe »

bibac wrote: post #4

I don't. Live is hard enough without you constantly pushing yourself and giving yourself a bad conscious for not reaching your goals. Relax, kick back and just do what you feel is fun.

I'm the same, when I look at some of the comments here it sounds rather joyless.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#105

Post by matty22 »

iamben wrote: post #31

Daily stuff, I use breeze.pm, which is a bit like Trello except has swimlanes. For current stuff I have a board separated into three swimlanes - client work, my work and personal. These are separated in columns - this week, today, doing, blocked and done. I'll add to and move between columns as necessary. I keep pretty high level (like I don't want a million tiny tasks), but everything that's listed has to be accompl…

Intrigued by this breaking the year into quarters idea. What's the name of the BitBar plugin you use for this?

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#106

Post by iamben »

matty22 wrote: post #105
iamben wrote: post #31

Daily stuff, I use breeze.pm, which is a bit like Trello except has swimlanes. For current stuff I have a board separated into three swimlanes - client work, my work and personal. These are separated in columns - this week, today, doing, blocked and done. I'll add to and move between columns as necessary. I keep pretty high level (like I don't want a million tiny tasks), but everything that's listed has to be accompl…

Intrigued by this breaking the year into quarters idea. What's the name of the BitBar plugin you use for this?

I wrote it myself. You're more than welcome to have the code if you want it (it's pretty simple!!). The quarters are like new year's resolutions - but easier to stick to because it's only 12 weeks. The plugin is just a visual reminder of where we're at.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#107

Post by matty22 »

iamben wrote: post #106
matty22 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intrigued by this breaking the year into quarters idea. What's the name of the BitBar plugin you use for this?

I wrote it myself. You're more than welcome to have the code if you want it (it's pretty simple!!). The quarters are like new year's resolutions - but easier to stick to because it's only 12 weeks. The plugin is just a visual reminder of where we're at.

That'd be great! Do you have it online in a repo somewhere you could link me to?

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#108

Post by iamben »

matty22 wrote: post #107
iamben wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote it myself. You're more than welcome to have the code if you want it (it's pretty simple!!). The quarters are like new year's resolutions - but easier to stick to because it's only 12 weeks. The plugin is just a visual reminder of where we're at.

That'd be great! Do you have it online in a repo somewhere you could link me to?

Drop me an email. Domain in my profile :-)

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#109

Post by ohmatt »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #45

Loop Habit Tracker for Android is the only thing that has ever worked for me for tracking goals -- and sticking to them. https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits Simple interface where you set your "habits" and how frequently per week you expect to do them. (E.g. exercise 4x per week, eat healthy 6x per week). Then you simply check off each day whether it happened. The analytics makes it clear if you are doing the right thi…

I actually switched to this a couple months ago, mainly because I was using other habit-tracking apps that only allows a certain number of habits available for free.

I didn't even know about the statistics, as I just wanted a way to check yes or no and see the past week to see if I needed to change things from week to week. Knowing I can see the trends changes everything... I think I'm going to need to add a few more things to this because this could be extremely helpful for me with several things. It was helpful enough just seeing week to week at a glance, but being able to see trends and long-term progress is great.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

#110

Post by ohmatt »

Not really a solution, but a problem that I have (which this thread has actually given me several new ideas to try fixing) isn't so much organizing or tracking my goals, it's that even when I get them organized, and plan out my days (not excessively, but a handful of easily achievable things I want to do in a day or week) I find that I don't have the drive or motivation to accomplish them half the time.

Getting home from work exhausted, not from stress exactly, but from just being focused and working for the whole day + commuting + going to the gym, makes it hard to find the energy to do the things I WANT to do. So I end up going for the easy thing, which is browsing HN or Reddit, watching TV, playing video games. I do enjoy those things, but feel like I waste time when I do them.

I have realized in the past several months the very common idea that getting started is the hardest part. Most of the time when I force myself to just start on something, I end up investing hours into it.

The other problem is that I want to do too many things, and often don't want to start on a side project, or practicing an instrument, because I don't want to do just one thing for the night and neglect other things, which leads to just doing nothing of value that I wanted to do.

I just try to constantly remind myself that if I spend an entire night practicing keyboard, it's a thousand times better than thinking about the things I want to do, and then browsing the internet all night.

To the original topic though: I use a combination of Keep, OneNote, and a Habit tracker to help. It's just the breaking through and starting on things that is the main issue for me. Thinking of trying out a kanban board to track personal goals though.

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