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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?

#71

Post by nihlaak »

chillacy wrote: post #67

I break a Trello board into four columns: 1. Habits which have some weekly frequency (meditate 10 mins 3x/w) and are all aligned to one or more... 2. Goals which are measurable (complete 3 headspace packs) and all align to... 3. Values which are unique to me (mental health) which agree with... 4. Principles or rules of nature which apply to everyone (better mental health leads to more happiness, happiness leads to be…

I do something similar but not very structured. I've got a few questions:

  * Do you represent the alignments (e.g. goals aligning to values) in the board somehow, or is that you just in your head?
  * Do you track progress on 2-4, or just on the actual execution of habits? If so, how?
  * Are the values (3) just a subset of (4)?

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

#73

Post by sbjs »

I personally choose to have so few goals that I can count them on one hand, and remember them at all times. This means I have to say "no" to a lot of interesting ideas that come to mind, so it's a compromise for sure. But it means I'm always on top of my goals and always making progress towards them.

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

#74

Post by xtiansimon »

grosjona wrote: post #61
kd5bjo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without goals, how do you decide what you do and don’t need to get done?

I think that it's better to be guided by passion and personal principles than some cheesy list of goals that you tick off one at a time. Maybe they just have a single unachievable goal that they work towards endlessly; I think that's a worthy goal and it definitely wouldn't fit into a list format.

Exaclty! Except I use many unachievable goals that I work towards endlessly...to develop my touch-typing skills.

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

#75

Post by egypturnash »

thesimon wrote: post #42

Semi-Related: How do you come up with long-term-goals? Owning a car in the Bay is worthless, real estate is too expensive. Traveling the world is nice, but it might get boring after some years. I kinda like my work and my life, but I feel like I should have a big future goal.

If you want to take a mystical angle on it, start reading stuff about one's True Will.

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

#76

Post by sunnybythesea »

noelwelsh wrote: post #23
enitihas wrote: post #15

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…

Seconding org mode. It's great. Super configurable but easy to get started with.

Orgmode has been great. However, after Org Timeline was recently removed, I've struggled to get the same functionality with custom agenda views.

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

#77

Post by ryanstorm »

Another +1 for journal here. Specifically, the bullet journal: http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/

It's very modular, so you can do whatever you want with it. But I write a daily to-do list and also use it to keep track of longer term tasks and goals.

I have used it for 3 years now, have filled up two moleskin-type journals, and my SO and I are convinced that this is the single best thing we've done to improve ourselves.

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

#78

Post by mcrittenden »

bpatel576 wrote: post #16

I take a video of myself each morning talking about what I want to get done that day. At night I watch the video, take a mental note of what I need to work on the next day based on what I did and didn't accomplish that day. Repeat.

That's interesting. How long do the videos tend to be? Any particular reason why you think this works better than just writing them down?

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

#79

Post by gaurgo »

grosjona wrote: post #58

I only have a single personal goal in life and it changes slightly over time as I learn more about life so it wouldn't make sense for me to write it down. I just think about it and work towards it every minute of every day so I don't need to track/organise anything. It's more like a principle than a goal. The idea that someone would have a rigid list of goals and work through it like some kind of checklist sounds ver…

It might be cringeworthy for you, but others may need goals like that which can become incrementally more challenging for their discipline.

Breaking down a goal into a checklist can be useful, e.g. one of my goals was to work at a big company. I broke it down into action items, like who can I talk to? What habits do I need to implement for the medium term to accomplish this? With this systematic approach I made it happen. Another goal I had was to learn a third language. I broke it down into different modalities to hack it over the past year, and now I’m about to spend several months in the country practicing the language.

A list of goals does not need to be rigid, and they could be secondary goals for one’s primary goal or mission.

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