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Useful Tool for Daily Tracking: 42goals.com

Strategies and goals

Screen shot for 42goals.com

I’ve talked in other posts about the powerful effects of tracking progress daily when working toward important goals. Tracking gives better information to use in making decisions and offers a big boost to mindfulness–being aware of what we’re doing as we’re doing it so that we have the opportunity to make different choices.

Exactly how we track doesn’t matter much as long as it’s accessible, convenient, and does the job. For anyone who, like me, is around computers much more often than not, 42goals.com is an appealing, free, Web-based tool for tracking progress. Here are some good things about the site:

  • entirely free
  • very easy to use
  • offers charts and graphs
  • encourages daily tracking
  • friendly and visual

As far as I know, there’s currently no mobile version of the site, which would certainly be a welcome addition.

One minor problem with the site is that in a way it encourages tracking many goals at once, as some of the examples on their site demonstrate. While I think they’re just intending to show off everything the system can do, I have to say that trying to track more than a very few, related things at once is an almost sure-fire way to fail. As human beings, we’re just not capable of tackling a lot of different major habit changes at once. As much as we’d love to perfect our lives all in one fell swoop, every time we try to do that we fall flat on our faces, because it requires spreading our time, attention, and effort too widely. Habit change requires focus.

With that said, for someone who wants to track one or a very few goals on the computer, 42goals (or a similar system; there are others available, although 42goals seems particularly well-implemented) will be a great help.

By the way, if you use a system like this, be sure to provide for situations when you can’t use your usual tools. For instance, when you’re going to be away from a computer for a stretch of time, it’s important to have a small notebook or something with you that you can use to record things to copy into your main system later. This has to be planned in advance, since waiting until something actually needs to be recorded usually makes it too effortful to get the tracking done, interrupting the tracking habit and often derailing it completely, even when you’re back in your usual routine.

If you’re tracking exercise and calories for weight loss, by the way, I’d suggest using a much more specialized (but still free) tool like SparkPeople.

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