Web App: Joe's Goals

I'm a wee bit obsessed with productivity and I'm always on the lookout for tools, habits, and processes to incrementally improve myself in that regard.

Recently a tweet from LifeHacker breezed through my Twitter feed (more on that later) linking to an article on Top 10 Tools for Sticking to Your New Year's Resolutions. One of these caught my eye in particular: Joe's Goals.

Joe's Goals is a dead simple little web application that allows to easily track your habits, both those you'd like to improve upon (wear sunscreen is one of mine) and those you want to avoid (eating fast food, for example). Your goals are the rows and days are the columns and you click in a box to add a checkmark, or click a checkmark to remove it. That's the gist of it, but there are more fun little featurelets if you choose to make use of them. Goals can have tags by which you can filter your list as well as weights, which are totaled each day, giving you your daily score. Joe's Goals also tracks "chains" of consecutive days, generates summary reports, and provides a badge for your blog or iGoogle (more on that later too).

I've only fussed with it for a day or two, but it really hits that daily habits sweet spot just next door to a task list (daily repeating tasks are just oppressive). It took me no time to slam out at least 10 or 12 things I'd like to do every day (and a few to avoid). Time will tell if I can keep it up!

Joe's Goals is free, but they request just $12/year to be a paid subscriber. I may do just that, especially if he (Joe?) completes my circuit with an iPhone app.