Ask the Readers: Best Tools for Tracking Resolutions?
Published on - January 3rd, 2007 (by J.D. Roth) Kathy W. writes:
Do you know of any websites to help track progress on financial (and other) New Year’s Resolutions?
These sites would be excellent for tracking goals in 2007:
General
- Joe’s Goals is an east-to-use goal-tracking app. It lets you track positive and negative goals, and keeps a daily record of your progress. It’s free!
- 43 Things is a social-networking site where users can create lists of goals and dreams and share them with others. (The site has a nice page on making resolutions.)
- Though Backpack isn’t explicitly a goal-tracking app, it certainly can be used for that purpose. It offers a wide range of functions like to-do lists, reminders, and calendaring.
Money
- Wesabe is a free community-based personal finance app that lets you track your money using tags and more. It features a goals-tracking section. I reviewed Wesabe in November.
- Dimewise looks like a feature-limited Quicken replacement. I haven’t used it. There’s a demo movie to give you a feel for the app.
- NetworthIQ is popular among personal finance bloggers. It’s a handy tool that lets you track your wealth-building goals while comparing progress to others in your category.
Fitness
- Fitday is a free service that allows you to see calories burned and consumed, to set goals, and to track progress over time. I’ve been using this for years. The interface is a little clunky, but it’s a great app.
- Nutridiary is another free service. I haven’t used it, but it seems to offer similar features to Fitday.
- I’ve heard good things about MyFoodDiary, and the interface looks great, but there’s one big drawback: it costs $9/month to use.
What programs do you use to track your goals?
(Note: Remember that a good goal is a SMART goal: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-specific. Make goals concrete and specific. Make them achievable. But aim high. Write your goals down. Share them with others. Make them positive.)
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Great post, and thanks for all the great links & resources.
However, I would have to submit, based on personal experience, that you can’t discount the power of a simple solution — especially an easy paper-based solution.
You could get a moleskine notebook or a simple notepad. Write down your goals (preferably several copies) and put them where you’ll be sure to see them often — a copy taped to your bathroom mirror, a copy on dashboard of your car, copy taped to your computer monitor.
Then, every 2 weeks (or whatever timeframe works best for you), review the list, make adjustments, note your progress (or lack thereof) and refocus your efforts.
Often, with some of the software & web-based tools, I get so involved and enamored with the tracking tool, that I lose focus on what I’m actually supposed to be tracking.
Plus, pen & paper are highly mobile, easy to edit, and you can always reinforce with an online to-do list or one of the tools listed above.
Just my .02
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I’ve used Fitday for a while now, and I just want to warn that it’s inaccurate regarding calories burned. It’s a great tool for tracking diet, including calories, macronutrients, micronutrients, etc. But don’t believe how many calories it says you’re burning.
The only way to really know whether you have a calorie deficit or surplus is to step on the scale occasionally and see what your weight is doing. If you’re gaining, you have a surplus, regardless of what anything else says.
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What’s a negative goal?
I use the calendar function in Outlook. It’s easy to set up recurring appointments, so I just have an appointment asking me how I’m doing with x, y, and zed.
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What’s a negative goal?
Goals should be framed in terms of what you want, not in terms of what you don’t want. In other words, you should write goals that lead you toward your objective rather than looking back at the problem. Here’s a wikipedia article on the NLP side of this concept.
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As of two days ago, I have fallen in love with Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com); it’s like Google’s customizable home page, only BETTER.
I have a tab set up for each area of my life, and have sticky notes and To Do Lists, etc. on each tab.
I’m trying to drink the David Allen-GTD Kool Aid, and I’m using it as my main collecting area.
We loves it, yes we do.
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A better nutrition/fitness tracker than fitday is sparkpeople.com. It’s free, it has message boards and tips (if you want) and you can use it to track calories fitness & other goals.
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I second the recommendation for sparkpeople.com. It’s like a more updated, fully-featured version of fitday with lots of good articles, tracking and goal-setting features, and tons of support options…
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I used http://www.thedailyplate.com/ when I was actively losing weight. I no longer use it, for the simple fact that I got tired of entering food data in all the time – something that would be detrimental to any site, I think. However, I used it long enough to A: lose the weight I wanted and B: get a good grasp on how many calories a lot of the foods I eat regularly have, thus enabling me to continue even without the site.
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Sparkpeople.com is really good.
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Nice post J.D., I was working on one just like this. Thanks too for the NetworthIQ link.
For the Fitness category, I was looking at Traineo, it’s got a cool look to it. Here’s some others too:
PEERtrainer
FunBeat
FitLink.com
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Ditto on the SparkPeople.com recommendation. It’s a great site for keeping track of a lot of different things, and can provide recommendations based on your goals (lose X amount of weight in Y amount of time, for example).
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[...] Get Rich Slowly: “Ask the Readers: Best Tools for Tracking Resolutions? Joe?s Goals is an easy-to-use goal-tracking app. It lets you track positive and negative goals, and keeps a daily record of your progress. It?s free!” [...]
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I use BIM (Bones in Motion) from my Verizon Phone..it works great and I don’t need to log anything..the phone does it for me.
http://bimactive.com/ba/ui/land_main.php
PS. it’s 9.99 a month
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I use my head; it just works for me.
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Another site which could be added to the fitness category is http://www.nutrlog.com
I like the fact that they allow you to enter your own calories burned. Plus they also have a bigger food database including an increasing list of brand foods.
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I like about.com’s calorie counter plus. I paid for weightwatchers.com for a while, but this is better (and it’s free!). You also get the really cool analyzer to tell you how your nutrition is doing each day, (A , A-,etc.,) so you focus on the right things like vitamins, potassium count, etc. — not just weight
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I’d like to recommand another cool web app specifically designed for tracking goals and todo list, and time logging too is called GoalsOnTrack.com. It’s free at http://www.goalsontrack.com.
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Another one is BlotMarks – http://www.blotmarks.com. This is similar to Joe’s Goals, but in my opinion it’s a bit nicer. Granted, I may be bias since I created it.
It’s free too, so that’s a plus.
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Check out spryee if you haven’t already: http://www.spryee.com.
It let’s you track activities and monitor your progress via graphs and a yearly calendar summary. Plus it’s very pleasant to look at and work it.
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