Track Your Progress with Joe’s Goals

Sometimes, a graphical representation is all we need for motivation. If you exercise daily or always keep your website up-to-date, shouldn’t you get a “personal” pat on the back? That is precisely what Joe’s Goals is for. Registration is free and takes all of ten seconds. Then, you are free to add both positive and negative goals in a simple, easy-to-use web interface. When you complete a goal, click in its square for the current day of the week (a click for a positive goal gets you a check, a click for a negative goal gets you an “x”). You can add as many checks as you want per day (if, perhaps, you updated your website seven times today, you can have seven checks). Then, you can view reports to view your progress. If you’ve been setting goals for yourself but just want to see them all in one place in a simple, visual way, then Joe’s Goals is for you.

Joe’s Goals – Free Online Habit Tracker

A Simpler Twist on Todo.txt

I was perusing Slacker Manager the other day when I came across their “Best Of” section. There are many interesting posts featured there, but one caught my eye. It is called “Append to text file v.4” Using the free program AutoHotkey as a base, this post gives you a script that allows you to append text to a text file with a timestamp. This could have many uses: research, a worklog, etc., but I chose to use it for a to-do list. Keyboard shortcuts allow you to easily append text, dump the clipboard into the file or call up the file itself. With some simple editing of the script file, you can set the path of the text file to be anywhere on your computer. I will try this out for a few weeks , but at the moment it seems like a much simpler alternative to the previously-discussed Cygwin method of Todo.txt.

Remember the Milk: A Worthy Alternative to Todo.txt

If you’re not much into the Cygwin, Unix bash-script menagerie that is the Todo.txt organization system, you should try the web-based task manager Remember the Milk. It’s a whole lot simpler than Todo.txt, and has a lot of great features unique to itself. For example, you can view a Google Maps/RTM mashup of your tasks by the locations that they are based upon (for example, you would pre-configure the address for Kroger, and when you typed “buy milk” as a task, you’d select Kroger as the location). If you have a lot of tasks sprawled out in different areas, this can really help you plan your day. RTM also allows you to add different “lists” (more like contexts to those GTD folks) to which you can append tasks so that they are not all floating around in one big task bowl. And with sharing and publishing capabilities as well as a spiffy Web 2.0 interface, RTM is a viable contender to other methods of organization. In fact, in comparison to Todo.txt, I am starting to favor RTM. So, give it a try- it’s free!

No Outlook, No Blackberry, Just .txt

I’m not much of a fan of complicated things. I, for one, do not need ten copies of my information floating around in different devices. I set my limit at two or less. One local, one on a flash drive. I also do not like to open my organization program to enter a to-do and be barraged with messages and buttons that serve no purpose to me. This is why I log my to-do list using some downloadable scripts and a plain text file. This method is known as Todo.txt. I personally use the todo.sh script. You can find the download links on the page, and install it through plain text editing and Cygwin using the instructions provided. Then, you can carry your todo.txt file on your flash drive and access it from any computer, Internet access or not. For more information, read this Lifehacker post.