Keep Your New Year Resolutions

Now that Christmas is over, it’s time to start thinking about New Years resolutions ideas.

For most people, that means making a list of goals that will hopefully last two or three months, before they are forgotten entirely, reports MakeUseOf.com.

Perhaps you need a bit of inspiration to start your resolution-making for next year too? If so, read on for 5 great tools to help you do just that!

43Things
A site meant for keeping track of life goals, although it does have a section specifically for resolutions. Honestly, I found the site to be a bit confusing to navigate at first. When you sign up, you can immediately start to add goals for yourself, but keep in mind, you have a maximum of 43 goals.

Habitforge
A bit like 43Things, but the premise is that it takes only 21 consecutive days to form a habit. Thus, this site works particularly well for resolutions where repetition is the key to success. Examples would be “run for 30 minutes every day” or “read 10 pages of a top 100 classics book every day”. Once you add a habit, Habitforge emails you daily to ask about your progress.

Joe’s Goals
If you don’t mind a plain interface, Joe’s Goals is also a great online habit tracker, which allows you to assign point values to each goal to denote its importance. You can denote whether a goal is positive or negative (for example, ‘wasting time at work’ might be negative while ‘keep desk clean’ would be positive), and for each day, Joe’s Goals will add your point totals depending on which tasks you completed. You can then view a graph of your point totals over time. This graph can also be embedded in a variety of places, including iGoogle as a gadget.

OneNote
For those who don’t want to sign up for yet another service, OneNote, or any other notebook software is a great way to track goals. Dedicate an entire notebook to your resolutions, and make a separate section for each of your resolutions. Then, you can either fill the pages of each section with entries on how far you’ve progressed (akin to 43Things), with your grandoise plans on how to accomplish your goals, or even pictures / screenshots / other types of media to document your work.

Google Calendar
Another way to track your resolutions using the tools you most likely already have is Google Calendar. Simply make a new calendar specifically for your resolutions, and create repeating events for each resolution, on the days you want them to be observed. Then you can set GCal to remind you by email (or by SMS if you have that set up) when you need to complete a task in order to keep your resolution.

Photo by ba1969.

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