
Ask HN: How do you track your personal goals? - mezod
I wonder if you just have a todolist or if you have other ways to break your goals down into actions that you can execute on on a daily basis, to break through the noise of every day life...
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Someone1234
May I recommend you check out Trello with the "Trello Card Repeater[0]."
Trello without the repeater is a really powerful way to organize your life,
turning your life into a series of big cards with tasks in it, that give you a
sense of accomplishment when you close one.

You then tack on automatic cards which appear on a schedule (e.g. "take out
the trash," "clean this," "fix that," etc) and you have a even more useful
productivity tool. You could of course use a traditional digital calendar for
these with reminders, but pop-up reminders can be distracting/overwhelming, or
ignored. A Trello card can sit in a bucket waiting until you have time in your
schedule.

You can then combine it with something like the Pomodoro Technique[1] to help
with uncontrolled procrastination.

Best of luck!

PS - There are other competitors to Trello which offer a great list experience
(e.g. KanBanFlow, Microsoft Planner, etc). They're all good. Unfortunately few
offer the Card Repeater. KanBanFlow offers built in Pomodoro timers tied to
particular cards which is a huge win (Trello has third party support for
Pomodoro timers, but that doesn't follow you cross-device).

[0] [https://blog.trello.com/trello-card-
repeater](https://blog.trello.com/trello-card-repeater) [1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique)

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ioddly
I did something similar for 2-3 years, then eventually wrote a piece of
software that handles specifically this use case:
[https://github.com/ioddly/meditations](https://github.com/ioddly/meditations)

(It actually doesn't repeat automatically, but you can copy monthly tasks down
to the day). I also have it doing a little bit extra, tracking completion
rates.

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skinnymuch
I use Complice.co[0]. I switched to it because it is centered around goals and
daily intentions. My todo lists can get bogged down after some time. Also the
post is for personal goals so this works even better.

Complice has you set goals up, optional milestones, optional reviews weekly
and monthly, and the biggie is daily intentions. You set your todos or
intentions daily. Intentions are also set using which goal an intention is
geared toward. You can have repeating or saved intentions too. It’s hard to
describe because it’s pretty unique. It also has virtual coworking rooms. I
hover usually in one of them[1].

[0] [https://complice.co](https://complice.co) [1]
[https://complice.co/room/open](https://complice.co/room/open)

~~~
dubin
Yes! I also use Complice and think very highly of it. Coworking rooms with
friends are incredibly useful at turning nights I otherwise would be slacking
off into productive nights. Another feature that I find useful (aside from the
core feature set) is the Beeminder integration, which lets me update all the
things I Beemind w/ little effort.

I do use Complice in tandem with Omnifocus. I use Omnifocus to store big
picture planning and all the tasks I want to do in the future. Then on a daily
basis I set intentions for the tasks I want to do that day in Complice.

~~~
skinnymuch
Yeah I use Complice in tandem with either Basecamp or Asana, whichever one I'm
not switching away from. Helpful that way.

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jolmg
Pocket notebook.

Some pages have notes of stuff I think about during the day (for future
goals). Mostly, though, I have per-day todo lists. I leave a blank line
between items to add optional metadata later, like scheduled/due time,
category, time estimate, when I started and when I finished.

I chose paper media because it makes it easier to experiment with different
formats. The pocket form factor allows me to carry it everywhere.

When I want to track my goals and progress on a software project, though, I
opt for org-mode in emacs. It's mostly because it's faster to type than to
handwrite and staying on the computer keeps me in tune. Also, it gives
tremendous freedom to organize notes and tasks. There's a lot of features and
minimal clutter despite that.

It's too bad it's lacking a good android app.

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muzani
What I do is pick one goal for a period of time and focus on that.

Sometimes that goal is simply getting my job done - get enough sleep, get up
early.

Sometimes it's to learn something, read a book, finish a personal project, get
a job, win a game. In these cases I'd break down what I need to accomplish
these tasks, along with a plan.

Sometimes it requires more information and so the plan becomes to set the
timeline.

The biggest issue in this field is that there's a bottomless amount of
interesting things to do. So if you do whatever just feels interesting, you
bounce from one thing to the next without really getting anything done in
depth.

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_Chief
Todoist, ui/ux is intuitive, allows you breakdown tasks into subtasks, set
reminders, group project tasks, can sync to google calendar. Though what I
like most about it is the 7-day tasks view's simplicity. (I'm on premium, the
free version losses a bunch of features eg reminders)

I was using Trello for a while but found the UI to be a bit of a pain as both
mobile and desktop require a lot of horizontal scrolling and it was hard to
take a high-level view of upcoming tasks. Maybe I was just using it wrong.

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itake
Daily Goal Tasks with Todoist.

In order to accomplish goals, I set regular repeating tasks that I do to help
me accomplish the goal. For example, I want to learn Spanish, so every day my
task is to study 3 new Spanish words and once per week I review the words I
learned.

I found if a goal (like a software task) was too broad, it wouldn't get
accomplished. Breaking my goals down into small repeating tasks has helped me
accomplish them.

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willidiots
Habitica - if you're into gamification, it's a cool way to build positive
habits, daily todos and long-term todos.

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cvaidya1986
Apple Notes app

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roryisok
Text / markdown file on Dropbox

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matchmike1313
I have been using a Google Sheet

