Track your goals and habits with Joe's Goals

I’ll admit it, I’m a stats junkie. I like to track progress, see numbers, have charts on whatever it is I’m trying to accomplish. I share my blog stats with you on a weekly basis in the weekly reviews.

I track my goals and habits on a daily basis too. For this I use Joe’s Goals, a simple web app designed to do just that. In this post I’m going to share with you how I use Joe’s Goals.

Setting up an account

This is a breeze! No annoying questions, just an email address, a nickname and a password and you’re all setup.

Configuring your goals and habits

Once you setup your account, you can start configuring your goals and habits. There are two types of entries that you can make, Goal or Logbook. Goals have scores, Logbooks are meant for comments.

I use both types. Goals are meant for checking off on habits I have completed successfully for the day or for checking of on activities that lead me closer to accomplishing my goals. The Logbook-type I use for planning purposes and for making notes on things I have done. And I use them in combination too, more on that later.

As you can see in the images, the setup screens for an entries are pretty straightforward. They have a nice set of options, but nothing too fancy.

• Goal name
  Like it says, this is where the name goes. Choose any name you like, you don’t have to worry about sorting, because you can change the sort order later.
• Tags
  You can put tags in here. I don’t use this feature.
• Weight - goal only
  You can give a score to the checks you put in this goal. Values range from 1 to 10. This is something I use to give relative weight to my goals and habits.
• Type - goal only
  You can choose whether you want the goal to be positive and earning you points, or negative making you lose points. All my goals are positive, because I want to reward myself for doing something I like, not punish myself.
• Target Days
  Use this feature to mark on what days you want the goal to be active. My weekly review habit for instance is only active on Sundays.
• Display Stats - goal only
  Here you can select what stats you want to see in the overview screen.
• Notes
  And finally, this is where you put whatever it is you feel you need to write down. This does not show in the overview screen.

Sorting your goals

Goals and habits are initially ordered in the order you create them. But fear not as it’s easy to sort them later on, when you discover one you forgot. Just click in the upper right hand corner on the link to “sort goals”. There you can sort them by Alphabetically, by Goal Type or Weight.

If you’re like me, you want neither of those orders. For people like us, you can create a custom sorting order by simply rearranging the goals in the list. Scroll down and click on the “Save Custom Sort Order” button in the bottom.

The overview screen

When you trusted all your goals, habits and other thoughts to the program, you get a nice overview of all your entries in a table. The entries are listed on the left, and you get a week’s worth of spaces to mark your progress.

The default view places the current date as the last date in the table. But using the arrow in the top right hand corner, you scroll forward into the near future. By clicking the calender icon, you can choose a date further away.

Some of my tricks

• Injecting Planning: This feature, combined with the Logbook item, is a great way to inject some planning into the table. I use this for my renovation project as you can see. There’s not an awful lot of room for text, so you can’t be too verbose. By putting the Logbook for actuals (a) right below the planning (p) I can see instantly how much of my plan got executed (and consequently whether I need to adjust my planning).
• Divide into sections: Another trick I use is to divide my table into sections, by inserting a Logbook item with no active days. This results in a blue bar across the table. Make sure to give it a clickable title though (like the dashes I used). I have one goal dangling on the bottom of the table, where I brilliantly used the spacebar to give it an unclickable name. I still need to send a mail to ‘Joe’ to get that one removed from the database.
• Declining points for ‘old’ habit changes: As you can see I used the weight function a lot. For the habits section, I more or less have a system for that. The habits that I have been doing for quite a while now get a lower score than the ones that I just started. But some of them are multi-clickable, like the “Drink water” habit. Every glass of water results in a checkmark.
• Extra credit for perfect days: When I have a perfect day with all my habits, I allow myself to check the main habits goal as well, scoring me an additional 10 points. This is one I came up with fairly recently, so I have yet to get the pleasure of putting in a checkmark there!

Now get started!

There are more features to be discovered in Joe’s Goals, and I could write a lot more about it. The truth is that I don’t use the rest of the features, so I’m not going to elaborate on them.

The biggest benefit of using Joe’s Goals is the fact that you’re inclined to check in daily, to score your progress. Doing this on a daily basis will help you build your goals and habit changes into your daily routine, increasing the likelihood of success.

The important thing is to get started. So surf on over to Joe’s Goals and start tracking your progress. Use my tips if they suit you, or come up with your own hacks. But ultimately it’s not about the hacks or the tracking software, it’s about getting serious about change and progress. But this sure is a nifty tool to enable you to succeed.

Oh…and in case you’re worried about forgetting to check-in on a regular basis: you will get an e-mail reminder (after a configurable number of days) to get your butt back to the site and hold yourself accountable!

Posted in counting beans on Wed 2008.04.02