Tech For Life

Along with at least half the western hemisphere, I made a number of New Year’s Resolutions the other day. Now I will be the first to admit that I am not necessarily the best person at keeping to such promises, but I always make them with the very best of intentions, determined that “this year will be different”. With the help of joesgoals.com it just might be that this year actually is…

Joe’s Goals is a webapp that is simple and easy as your favourite flavour of pie. When you sign up, you can straight away start setting some goals. This is done via a very neat entry system that ensures you can always see what is going on. You can set the frequency of the goal, and whether the goal is positive or negative. Positive goals are easy to understand, you promise to jog 5 miles every 2 days, so you set up a Positive goal called “Jog 5 miles”, you select every other day, and hit enter. Each time you go jogging on schedule, put a tick in the box. You can also put multiple ticks in boxes, so if you jog 10 miles, put two ticks in, and get twice the credit.

Negative goals take a few seconds to turn your brain around. For example, you might want to promise youself that you will only eat jelly on a Friday - type “Jelly only on Fridays” as your goal, and set it as a negative goal because you are effectively promising not to have jelly on any other day. Then all you have to do is select every day except Friday, and hit return. This will add the goal to your calendar, and give you a box to put a cross in if you are naughty.

Finally, you can also add a goal as a “logbook” which simply gives you a diary on the days you choose to make an entry.

All of this is pointless of course unless you can see how you are doing over time, and Joe has kindly set up some standard reports that allow you to look at the last 30, 60 or 90 days as a graph of success and (hopefully not…) failure. One other item worthy of note is that you can add weighting to your goals, so if you decide that “Jogging 5 miles” is worth twice as much as “Jelly only on Fridays” then it will take two days of jelly to drag down the one day of jogging, and so forth.

As with any system like this, it does rely on you being honest with yourself, but if you can do that, then Joe’s Goals could be just the motivation you (and I…) need to make this year different.

Happy Jogging!