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

I use a Trello board for my 10 year goals. Lists are:

1. Primary Goals

2. Secondary Goals

3. Immediate Goals

5. To-do this week

6. Daily

I started it at the end of 2015 so there's a card in primary goals list for each major thing that I would like to have accomplished (or just continued to do) by the end of 2025. Each primary goal gets its own label and a checklist of what specifically accomplishing that goal means to me.

Secondary and immediate goals are how I broke down the bigger goals into smaller, more manageable parts. For example, one of my primary goals is "Health." So a secondary goal might be "rock climb twice per week" or "research ways to improve my memory". Every card in every list has a label/labels that relate them back to a primary goal.

The weekly and daily todos further break everything down into things that I can focus on in the next day or week.

Here's what I learned:

- For all of 2016 (the first year) I would update this Trello board religiously every day with my weekly and daily todos. I found that I actually didn't enjoy doing this. While things were getting done, they didn't seem to be things that were that important or impactful. I stopped doing this so I could completely cut out those last two lists. Now I re-visit the board every so often when I feel like I need a reminder or what past-me thought was important. Sometimes I update the primary goals (I've only added to this once and never removed from it) and more frequently I'll decide that a secondary or immediate goal didn't make sense so I'll get rid of it or add a new one. The whole process is much more free form and I think that works better for me.

- One of my mantras that has come out of this exercise has been "don't do something for just one reason." The things that I tend to enjoy and accomplish successfully are ones that have multiple primary goal labels on them. Sometimes they only have a loose relation or benefit but it's still more compelling to me because if it turns out one of the benefits doesn't work out the way I planned then there's still a reason to be doing this thing for another reason.

Still an ongoing experiment but I'm generally happy that I'm doing it.

I also use a trello board. I have one column for each year, plus a wishlist column with short/mid/long term goals and a separate column just for travels that I want to do. Once a task is completed I mark it with the green label. If I just don't care anymore about something or I "fail" the task, then I mark it in red.

I find this setup quite helpful for:

- breaking down huge goals (such as learning a new language)

- having short/mid/long term goals all available at a glance

- giving priority to stuff I'd otherwise keep procrastinating (I tend to procrastinate for weeks or months doing several things until I put everything in one checklist at the top of the current year column and power through them all in a short time)

- giving myself some perspective and appreciate all the things achieved in the past months/years. Things that were once just dreams or seemed very hard to achieve are now the normal day-to-day life and it's way too easy to undervalue them.

I use the board in a positive way, in the sense that I don't see deleting tasks or failing to achieve something as some kind of failure. I only celebrate the green "done" labels.

EDIT: formatting

I use org mode for both regular work as well as one off targets. Org mode allows me to clearly bucket tasks into what is scheduled and needed by when, tag related tasks together but define them anywhere, also allows to define subtasks and track task progress in terms of sub tasks. It allows you to see your agenda on a configurable time period, and can also equally support GTD. Personally I find it to be a really nice place to dump all your thoughts and with trivial effort get them organised in a nice to see and search format.

I find that organization helps me accomplish much more; taking the time every Sunday to plan out my week makes focusing significantly easier and more productive.

For standard tasks, I use Excel to track my weekly tasks. I prefer Excel compared to a web application because it's just always open on my laptop: https://imgur.com/a/bp2sJYY - I break them down into priorities (Low - Absolute), class (blacked out column, I use the names of my two orgs), category, and a target date I set at the beginning of the week. - Anything not completed transfers over to the next week and is reassigned an appropriate priority and date. - Started this level of detail in Jan. 2018 and have been very happy with it.

For larger, more complicated projects I use a top-down approach I call strategic planning. I wrote a detailed article on the approach here: http://bit.ly/2zWlARj

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