5 online tools to track your new year goals and resolutions

Another year has gone by and it’s time to look back at our successes and failures, and time to renew our goals and resolutions, our commitments to ourselves and to others. Like millions of people, you probably made some resolutions in the past year. Maybe you wanted to lose weight, exercise more or read more books. Like a vast majority of people who made such resolutions, you probably never met your goals. This new year isn’t going to be any different unless you have a system of tracking your goals and monitoring your progress. So here are 5 free online tools that will help you to achieve your new resolutions, or at least help you keep them for a longer duration before you eventually break it.

1. Joe's Goals is one of the simplest yet powerful tool to track your goals online. The interface consist of a grid with the seven days of the week on one side and your goals on the other. The goals can be positive like exercise, read more, drink water etc. There are also negative goals that you may want to avoid like eating out, drinking etc. For every positive goal achieved you get a green checkmark, and for every negative goal you get a red checkmark. At the end of the day your points are tallied and you get a daily score. The objective is to improve your score as much as you can.

2. GoalsOnTrack is a web-based tool that can help you set goals, manage to-do lists, and keep things on track. You can create goals to achieve and add tasks to support them. Organize your goals into different categories and add priorities to them. It also has a journal or to-do-list where you can write down your thoughts or collect notes that are useful or relevant to your goals. If you have set yourself time based goals, then GoalsOnTrack also has a timer that will allow you to time your tasks. GoalsOnTrack has one of the nicest interface with a dashboard that gives a bird’s eye view of your tasks and your progress.

3. 8Goals is another online goal tracking application with a simpler interface. It allows you to specify your goals, the reason why you want to achieve it (this can act as a motivation) and the expected time of completion. Then you keep track of your progress by assigning a progress percentage to your goals in successive periods. If you want to set yourself daily goals, then Joe’s Goals will probably be a better choice. On the other hand, if you have longtime goals then 8Goals will suite you better.

4. Goalmigo, like the others, allow you to set goals and periodically enter your progress report. You progress is then shown in the form of graphs to help better access the situation. Goalmigo also provides a way to let you share about your goal and your progress with friends, family and other Goalmigo users. You can join groups with other people who have set themselves the same goals and share tips and support.

5. 43Things is one of the oldest online to-do-list and goal tracker. When you add a new goal, you will get a count of other users who want to do the same thing. You can then view the people who has already done it and get helpful tips and guides on how they did it. For example, when I type “drink more water”, I find that 17090 (at the time of writing this) people share the same goal. 2896 out of 2995 people (96%) think this is worth doing and 3703 people have already achieved it. It also shows me the list of things that the people who want to drink more water  also want to do and the list of things the people who once wanted to drink water are currently doing.

At the top of every page, a Google-style "Zeitgeist" link gives you such information as recent additions, all-time Most Popular Goals and the Most Popular Achieved Goals. 43Things is a great place to get motivated.

Before I hit submit, I want to wish each and everyone of you who visit and read Instant Fundas a very Happy New Year. Every visitor to this site, every new subscriber and every comment has been a big motivation for me to continue working on this site. Thanks to everybody.