How to motivate yourself isn’t taught in schools. It is something each of us must learn to do on one’s own…or take the help of the web for some pointers. One of the pointers that will serve you well is to keep motivation triggers simple.

The simpler it is, the easier it will be to spend more time on action rather than the rigmarole of motivational mumbo jumbo. So, here are four really simple ways you can motivate yourself.

Don’t Break the Chain

Do you believe that a series of successful actions can spur you towards continuing the habit of success? If you do then Don’t Break the Chain is a motivational app that should be on your daily to-do list. It is apparently based upon a technique used by Jerry Seinfeld, the American stand-up comedian. It uses a simple 3-step process:

1. Pick a goal.

2. Mark off the days on which you work toward that goal.

3. Use your chain of marked off days as a motivator.

As you can see, it is a simple calendar based app that allows you to mark off successful days with a click. Registering into the site enables you to manage your chains and configure the calendar.

iDoneThis

This minimalistic app also believes in the “streak”. You get an email everyday asking you about your achievement for the day. Successful days are marked on a calendar, and the streak of successful days should motivate you to continue with what’s making it all happen in the first place. As the site says – Inch by inch, anything’s a cinch. This app works just as effectively for teams as it does for personal have done’s. (See Directory mention)

LazyMeter

LazyMeter is a nice and neat app that simplifies your over-complicated to-do list; one of the main bugbears for lack of productivity. LazyMeter focuses on one day and task at a time. It doesn’t allow you to over reach and take on too much at one time.

The interface comes with pause ‘n play buttons that help you manage tasks. You can place the task you are currently engaged in into the play category and the remaining ones in the pause category. Pressing pause delays the task and you can take it up later. Tasks can be halted by using the Stop category and completed tasks appear in the Completed category. A progress bar is a visual indicator of how you are faring with your tasks. Productivity can also be visualized with the help of simple stats and a bar chart. (See Directory mention)

Aherk

This is the first time I have hear about a “self-blackmailing” motivational service. But Aherk.com is intriguing. The site uses fear and pressure (though in a fun and harmless way) to motivate action. Aherk uses the social community (and Facebook) as a blackmailing medium. Set a goal and upload an embarrassing picture of yourself. If you don’t want the photo to be displayed for everyone on Facebook, you better get down to the grind and finish your task within the deadline. This app asks for a bit of risk taking on your part, but the results could be worth it. (See Directory mention)

We have covered a lot of ground when it comes to personal development and self-improvement. Behind both lies the propellant of motivation. Check out our complete range of motivational posts and pick out the simplest ones which you use. If it’s not here, tell us about your favorite motivational app.

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Mindbloom is actually a bit of all these, but primarily the concept of the Mindbloom life game seems to follow the old adage that a giant oak grows from a tiny acorn. Mindbloom believes that the journey of life or at least its planning should be fun. Mindbloom says it’s a fun, simple and effective way to improve the quality of your life.

The Metaphor of a Growing Tree

Mindbloom uses the image of a tree to symbolically show that like a tree which grows from an insignificant seed, life improvement is the result of continuous actions – little by little. Each positive step nourishes our life and fills it with passion and purpose. Thus the building blocks of life growth can be set with goals and goal setting exercises.

But all this need to be an exercise in drudgery; it can be turned into fun with motivational boosters like music, images, social support, and a little bit of play. Mindbloom is designed to be an interactive platform for such life building activities. Just how it does all this is the moot reason for this article.

Grow the Life You Want With the Step By Step Animated Game

Start growing the tree of your life by choosing an area that you would like to improve. You can just as easily choose multiple areas. Each area of life (for example, health) is represented by a young sapling. Music and the super cool interface help to make this an exercise in fun.

Just like a real sapling, you have to nurture this too with the right ingredients like sunlight (music, images); and water (simple actions). The music and images are the motivational boosters for simple actions.

The basic tutorial continues and you are then introduced to the Enlightening Bug who helps you through the registration and log-in process with your first ‘tree’. Careful attention to detail and the fun element marks this life tracking app out. For example, check out the following screen which selects your gender. Isn’t that a bit different from the humdrum!

At every step, you can choose to get inspired (nourish the tree with sunlight) or take an action (remember, water). Just like a real tree, proper nourishment will require a balance of both. If you decide to start off with a bit of inspiration, you didn’t do wrong as the browser fills up with beautiful high-resolution images related to the life area you had chosen. In my case it was health, and I got this to perk me up:

You can personalize the slideshow with your own images too.

Now, Take Some Actions

The little helpful bug says that you can create your own actions or get some help from the community. Every action you complete helps to water the tree and unlock points. Earned points give you new stuff to look at and play around with. For instance, I earned a few points and unlocked for myself a package bundle of images and action packs. A typical action pack looks like this:

And this is how you can get inspired:

I hope you understood how Mindbloom balances action with inspirational tidbits to help you along the path of self-improvement. Better still you cannot just waltz through as you have to use your actions to unlock the advanced stages. The rewards of achievements could lead to more discoveries at Mindbloom. You can even buy “seeds” and unlock more inspiration packs.

The Circle of Life…and Friends

Self-improvement need not be a solitary exercise. That’s where Mindbloom’s own community and your friends who are on other social hangouts like Facebook come into the picture and form the “forest of friends” around your growing sapling.

The community serves two purposes – Firstly, it introduces social accountability and secondly, it builds your support group when you need a push up the motivational path. For example, you can post inspiring images in the gallery and invite comments over it.

The Mindbloom Life Game Is Fun

Mindbloom is sheer eye candy but beneath the beautiful design everything comes together, well – beautifully. It is a mind mapping application but a zero effort one. It is a goal setting tool but one which forces you into a fun game. And yes, it is a social community too, one which you have to ‘answer’ to for motivation.

Join in and tell us if you think that the Mindbloom life game is one of the best personal development tools out there. It certainly is the most fun. I haven’t been able to cover all the interesting sidelights of the application, so do explore it and tell us yours.

But what if your problem is more fundamental? What if you aren’t setting effective and proper goals in the first place? If your goals are sub-optimal, you may be impeding your own advancement. Here are some mistakes you might be making and how to avoid them in the future.

Mistake 1 : Goals That Are Not Specific & Not Measurable

Attend any seminar on goal-setting and often the very first thing you’ll hear is that goals must be quantifiable. In other words, measurable.

Your current goal might be to “lose weight”. How do you know when you’ve reached that goal? After you’ve lost 1 pound? 5 pounds? 85 pounds? Unspecific goals make it difficult to track progress. Without a sense of forward movement, you may lose motivation. And when you lose motivation, you stop trying.

The Fix: Whenever you set a goal, include hard numbers. Quantifiable goals give you a milestone or finish line towards which you can race.

Don’t just try to “lose weight”. Instead, “lose 25 pounds”. Want to run faster? No, you want to “run a 6-minute mile”. Aiming to “finish this coding project” is nebulous; “complete this program module by Saturday” is more measurable.

Mistake 2 : Goals That Are Unrealistic

So you’ve set a specific, measurable goal. Great! Now you must make sure that the goal is realistic. There is nothing that will kill your motivation quicker than an unrealistic goal.

Consider “I will read 1 book by Saturday”. Seems fine, right? The goal is measurable, and it is definitely attainable. You feel like you can do it, so you start on it.

Now consider “I will read 100 books by Saturday”. Instantly, you freeze. How are you going to read 100 books in such a short time? It’s too overwhelming, so you don’t even try. You procrastinate.

The Fix: It’s good to set goals that are challenging, but make sure they’re within reach. You know yourself better than anyone else does. You know your own limits, and you know how far you can push yourself.

Mistake 3 : Not Arranging Goals In Priority Order

Once you’ve started setting multiple goals, you have a decision to make – which of these goals am I going to tackle first?

Before you can answer that question, you’ll need to order your goals by priority. For some of you, this may seem elementary; for the rest of you, not doing this might be the reason why you don’t finish on time.

For example, is it more important to “fix the malfunctioning web server” or “fix the typo on the company website”? Obviously, one of those holds more importance. But even when the stakes aren’t so drastically different, prioritizing is important. It paves the way forward and prevents you from wasting too much time deciding on a task to tackle.

The Fix: So which goals should you prioritize? The most time-critical ones should be finished first. Always.

If deadlines aren’t an important issue for you right now, then you should prioritize core goals over peripheral goals. In other words, work on the things that will have a huge impact once completed before working on things that would be nice if completed but not entirely important.

Mistake 4 : Not Planning How To Accomplish Set Goals

Whether you have only one goal or a hundred goals, you should always have a plan on how you will accomplish them. Not having a plan leads to a state of mental paralysis where you don’t know what to do next – and that’s when you procrastinate.

It’s nice to set a goal to “read 10 chapters by midnight” but you won’t get around to it if you don’t set aside a chunk of time to actually read those chapters.

The Fix: Getting around this one is easy. When you set a goal, go ahead and set a bunch of “mini-goals” related to that one.

Take the chapter reading example above. Here are some possible mini-goals you could have:

• Finish the dishes by 7pm.
• Read from 7pm to 9pm.
• Relax from 9pm to 10pm.
• Read from 10pm to midnight.

Mistake 5 : Not Evaluating Progress On Current Goals

As you work towards reaching your goals, you must be careful not to fall into the mindset of “set it and forget it”. Every once in a while – not too often, not too infrequently – you need to evaluate your progress.

Are your plans and actions bringing you closer to reaching your goals? Are you any closer today than you were when you first started? Are your goals as measurable, realistic, and clear as you once thought? If not, then something isn’t working, and that calls for change.

The Fix: Set a frequency at which you can evaluate your progress in relation to your objectives. If you have weekly deadlines, you may want to evaluate daily. If your deadlines are months apart, then you may only need to review once a month.

Be diligent with your self-assessments and don’t be afraid to switch up your goals.

Do you set goals? If so, what sorts of problems do you run into? Do you have any tips and tricks that help motivate towards reaching goals? Share them with us!

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You can also use these future emails to create tiny time capsules. For e.g. if you have losing weight as a goal, you can post a photo of your current girth and then open it as a future date to see whether you shed the weight or the goal. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the service will stick around in a year’s time, but suddenly being reminded of your goals sometimes helps to jolt that laziness off your bones.

Lettermelater

Lettermelater is a rich tool that allows you to create HTML emails, add attachments (photos), and even send it from within your default email account. The service allows you to set a future date, down to the last minute, when the letter will get delivered. You can also specify CC and BCC recipients; helpful if you are part of a group that’s mentoring each other towards a goal. But the feature I like is Lettermelater gives you the option to set up multiple recurring emails by selecting a range and interval, or selecting the dates individually.

FutureMe

With FutureMe, you don’t have to log-in before sending out an email into the future. You can choose to go anonymous and put your emails into public view. The collection of public FutureMe emails is an interesting read. The mail interface lacks a rich text editor, but you can include pictures (webcam snaps or from the desktop) with your emails. Maybe, you can just ask yourself if you are still alive after December 2012. Keeping yourself alive inspite of the foreboding predictions of the Mayans could be a nice New Year resolution.

Eternity Message

The About Me page says something about the original intention of the site – We had originally written the application to capture our thoughts, experiences, and life lessons so those could be shared with our children.

The service uses a secure protocol and the servers store the future messages – they are not sent out as emails. Recipients receive a notification to view the future message on the site itself. An early warning notification is also sent to the sender 3 days prior to the actual delivery. Eternity Message comes in two versions – a paid one which allows you to send messages 60 years into the future and a free Lite version that allows you to send the email up to 1 year in the future and to a single person. The message has to stay within 1000 characters – that should be enough for a New Year resolution.

Email Future

Schedule a goals-to-achieve email in the future with this text only service and pat yourself in one year’s time when you can tick off a few from your 2012 New Year resolution’s list. You can also send it to four other addresses if you want to gloat about your achievements one year down the line. Of course, there’s a high chance that you could also have four eggs on your face. Email Future allows you to set a private or public (anonymous) permission.

Mail Freezr

Put your future emails in ice-cold storage and bring them back to live on January 1^st, next year. You can freely freeze your emails for any period between 1 – 100 years, so you are probably safe if you put down your resolutions for the year and check them out next year.

2012 will be soon over. The future will come soon enough. List out your goals using these services and when you get the mail from the past in your inbox, you can either gloat or regret that you let another year pass by without ticking off a few from your goals list. Are you using a geeky way to set your New Year resolutions? Or are they already lying in the waste basket?

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Their recently released a site is called 21habit.com, which is simple to use, but includes a little incentive that might make you stick to your goal.

How It Works

If you’re going to break a habit, it typically needs to be done in a reasonably short amount of time. The longer you take to break (or gain) the habit, the less likely you are to achieve your goal. With 21habit, you simply write the habit you want to break (or begin) and check in daily to the site to indicate whether you met your goal for that day. When you click the start button, you can register on the site or use your Facebook account to log in.

Most of us have at least one bad habit we would like to break but never get around to doing it. A bad habit might include nail biting, smoking, spending too much time on the computer or Facebook, procrastinating, spending too much money, gambling, watching too much television, not eating the right foods, etc. You might also want to start an habit, such reading a book on a daily basis, or going to bed at a certain time each night.

As with any goal, make sure your habit is something that you control, and is one that you can work toward each day.

Daily Monitoring

When you set a habit to break, 21habit will send an email each day for 21 days (or you can check into your account) to verify if you failed or succeeded in doing what you said you would do.

So if your habit is to quit smoking, this method works great, because most likely smoking is something you do everyday. But if your goal is to say stay away from your computer at least one day per week, 21habit might not the best way to monitor that goal on a daily basis, because for at least 6 days of the week you will be on your computer.

Committed vs. Free Mode

21habit includes an incentive, “Committed”, feature for breaking your stated habit. It requires you to invest $21 (using PayPal or credit card) that will be donated to one of five charities – American Red Cross, Amnesty International, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and United Way.

Each day that you fail your habit, $1 of your invested $21 goes to a charity. Personally I think I would be more motivated to have my $1 go to a charity each time I succeed in breaking my habit or reaching my goal. I think users should get the option for how they want their investment to be used.

21habit says that, “You have 3 days to check-in for a specific day. If, after 3 days, you haven’t checked-in then you will forfeit $1 for that day, and we’ll donate that $1 to charity.” You can end a habit or withdraw invested funds at any time, so basically this commitment is based on the honor code.

You can also use the Free Mode, which requires no investment.

Send Them Feedback

So far, 21habit has received a lot of positive feedback on Facebook and Twitter. The system is simple and easy to ease, and the charity donation feature may be a good motivation for many users. However, there are probably many other features that users will probably want to see made to 21habit.

First off, this online service would make for a great mobile phone app whereby you could check-in and verify your progress with a simple one or two taps. Also, 21habits only allows you to only do one habit at time, pledge only $21 at time, and commit to no more or no less than 21 days per goal. However, the site is requesting your feedback on these limitations. Click to their FAQ page to give email feedback on these issues.

Let us know what you think of 21habit.com. Is it a site that you might use to help with one of your New Year resolutions?

In fact, we’re now one week into the new year and how many of you actually stuck to your goals (or even bothered with them at all this year)?

But seriously now, let’s make this year the one where we really stick to our well made plans and finally achieve something worthwhile. Agreed? Read on for 3 solid ways to make those resolutions truly stick and make a difference in your lives.

Actionable Goals, not vague nonsense

The trouble with most of our New Years Resolutions are that they tend to be rather vague:

• Save $10,000
• Learn some Chinese
• Work out everyday

As any entrepreneur and serious self-improvement guru types will tell you, these are useless. They don’t describe anything about the steps needed to get to that goal, and things like “learn some Chinese” don’t even define a specific endpoint. Although specific goals such as “save $10,000” are admirable, they sadly aren’t actionable – meaning there isn’t a specific, defined action you can take to work towards that goal (other than say, moving $10,000 from your checking to savings account, in which case you probably don’t need to make that a resolution anyway). No, no, these will never do. Instead, make your goals into smaller daily or weekly actionable items – like these:

• Save $200 every week
• Complete one full Rosetta Stone Chinese session everyday
• Do 20 wall push-ups everyday
• Do 30 minutes of aerobic exercise everyday

Can you see the difference? We’re still saving $10,000 a year, but it’s something we can check the action for every week, or tick off every day.

If you’re having trouble thinking of some specific actionable items for your vague goals, check out anti-resolution from MeYouHealth. It’s a simple web app that’ll present you with some real, actionable items after you’ve selected your vague goal.

Now, you should have a much better resolution list consisting of many small, finite actions that you can check off as you complete each day. The next step then, is to track your progress.

Tracking Progress

Tracking your activities, or how much progress is being made in the case of weight loss etc, is in itself a huge motivator. In fact, it’s often said that simply measuring your waist every day is a great way to lose weight as it makes you eat more consciously. Here’s a mixed bag variety of tools that I think might help you, but remember that a trusty Excel/Google Docs spreadsheet can work just as well sometimes.

EpicWin (iTunes Link – $1.99)

This is my personal tool of choice, and can be summarized as a comprehensive to-do list with RPG game elements. After having created your character and added some repeating actions with associated point value, you hold the action for a few seconds to trigger some battle music and complete the item, thereby adding the points, maybe levelling up, and possibly even finding some loot!

Ok, so there is no actual roleplay ‘game’ in that there are no real fights or adventuring, but it’s a lot more fun than simply ticking off a daily item, and you could even compete with friends if you agreed on point values I guess. Check out the awesome video:

1daylater.com

If your goals revolve around spending time on a task or saving money daily, this might be the perfect tool for you. The interface is incredibly simple and allows you to track multiple projects with ease.

DailyTodo.org

A single purpose web app that would be great for your homepage. Unfortunately, it literally only tracks daily actions, so if you have weekly or monthly actions then forget it. Very simple, very fast.

GoalBot

We covered this in the directory before – it allows you to break down large goals or projects into a number of smaller steps, rather than a repeating daily task, as well as having social features. The interface isn’t exactly friendly though.

Still Got No Ideas?

If you’re in the mood for some change but really don’t have anything specific in mind, try the Daily Challenge. Saikat covered this in depth last year, but basically the system will email you random challenges every day which you can either skip or complete in one click.

Get Motivated!

Even with specific small steps to our goals, it’s often easy to forget to do them for a day, then another day, until ultimately we just don’t care anymore. No amount of web apps is going to help you there, but it does help to be in the mental state of constantly thinking about self improvement. Sign up to some newsletters or RSS feeds from motivational speakers and self improvement experts to keep yourself on track and motivated to complete your goals.

When I was first into self-improvement, Steve Pavlina was a big influence and motivation for me, and while his blog is still active it does seem to have moved away from the core teaching lately. I highly recommend the old podcasts and article archives though.

TheChangeBlog is a great general-purpose self improvement blog with a fantastic zen design to help you focus on the fantastic advice within (like learning how to set specific goals!)

That’s all from me today, as I’m busy sticking to my rigorous new daily action schedule! Don’t forget to check out all our other Self Improvement tagged posts too. Here’s wishing you all the best – happiness, health and prosperity this year! If you’ve found some other great tracking tools or motivational podcasts etc, do please share with us all in the comments – or maybe you’re brave enough to tell us your new year resolutions?

Though New Year’s resolutions and goals could easily be typed and printed out on a sheet of paper,  43Things.com offers more useful features than pen and paper, and it provides a simple method for managing your goals without having to invest in complex personal management software.

The following are some suggested tips for using 43Things.com in a more dedicated manner.

Creating A List Of Things

First off, there’s no requirement that you must come up with a list of 43 things in order to use 43Things. To keep from feeling overwhelmed, you might start off with a short list of to-do’s that you can complete in the next three or four months.

Secondly, it’s a good idea to develop a mixture of goals consisting of personal, job-related, fun and relaxing activities. You should also include goals that you can accomplish in less than a day, and a few that you might work on each week throughout the year.

As you develop your list, keep in mind the S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relative, and Time-bound) goals strategy made popular by the management consultant Peter Drucker, to ensure that your goals are well-defined and achievable. For example, instead of writing, “Improve my finances,” be more Specific with the goal of paying off a credit card debt, or saving a specified amount of money.

Use the “Add entry” feature in 43Things to make a short to-do list for some of your more challenging goals. Include how you will Measure the progress of your goal (e.g. saving 20% of your monthly income); how the goal will be Attainable (do you have the resources that will help you do it?); is it Relevant to your own personal life or professional needs?; and Time- bound, with a beginning and ending point.

And since this is the beginning of a new year, you definitely want to add new resolutions to your list, as well check out the list of 43Thing’s worldwide most popular goals for more ideas.

Setting Reminders

The number one reason I didn’t use 43Things on a consistent basis in the past is because I never set up a way to go back and monitor and review my list on a regular basis. In 43Things you can click on a goal and set up a designated e-mail reminder.

43Things also includes a Personal Challenge feature designed for you to home in on one particular goal and achieve it by a certain date.

Though 43Things is an online site, it is still a good idea to also print your list of goals and post them where they can be viewed on a regular basis.

Getting Motivated

43Things also has built-in motivation features. For example, each time you visit the site take the time to “cheer” the goals and resolutions of other site members. In turn you will also receive cheers for your own to-do’s.

You should also use the “Add an entry” and “Ask for advice” features to write journal reflections or set up a plan of action for achieving a goal.

You should also click on the 43 Things Zeitgeist page and read the comments and questions by other members working on their goals and resolutions. I find that cheering and helping others with their goals motivates me to achieve my own.

Celebrate Accomplishments

After you complete a goal, 43Things asks you if the goal was worth accomplishing, and how you achieved it. This is not only a good reflective tool, but your responses could very well help others who are seeking to accomplish your achievements.

In addition to keeping a list of things you have accomplished, your 43Things profile also includes a Year in Review page that charts your activity on the site. It’s useful to look back and see what you have accomplished.

So will you be setting goals for the new year? Have you used 43Things.com before? Let us know about your experience.

The key to accomplishing my goals is making them practical and measurable. But most importantly, your goals need to have a start and end date, and you must be reminded of your progress. Three websites, LifeStick.com, Solidgoals.net, and 43Things.com might be helpful in this regard. But before we turn to these, a simple calendar and e-mail reminder may suffice.

Calendar Method

If you’re not keen on joining yet another website, you can simply use Google Calendar or some similar application for setting up reminders about the goals you set. Simply resolving that you’re going to lose 10 pounds in three months is not enough. You need to make a plan to accomplish that goal, and you want to make progress toward that goal on a daily or weekly basis.

SolidGoals.net

SolidGoals.com is an easy to use and free website for creating goals, setting tasks and milestones, and reminders. After registering on the site, you can immediately start setting up goals and setting deadlines.

SolidGoals.com also includes social network integration (including Facebook) in which you can follow other goal setters and provide comments about what they seek to accomplish.

The key to using this site however is to set up a preparation list, milestones and e-mail reminders, especially for goals that are not integrated into your daily routine.

LifeTick.com

LifeTick.com has more professional features set up for individuals and professionals who coach others in related goal setting activities. While the free version only allows you to set up four goals with e-mail, smartphone, and iCalendar support, the service could still be very useful for more challenging and long-range personal goals.

LifeTick.com starts off by asking you to define your core values, such as lifelong learning, family, creativity, work, and relaxation. When you set up a goal you connect them to one of your core values which gives it more meaning.

A useful feature in setting goals on LifeTick it reminds you that your goal should be S.M.A.R.T.—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Specific.

You can also set up individual tasks to accomplish toward your goal, and receive designated e-mail reminders for your deadlines.

LifeTick also has an iPhone and Android web-based app (found here —not from the App Store) which can be useful for managing and keeping current on your goals.

43Things.com

We have written about 43Things.com before but it is worth mentioning again as the site is useful for brainstorming a healthy list of resolutions – both small and large – and accomplishing them as you see fit.

Based on my own experience, it is quite easy to set up goals on 43Things.com and then forget about it. So again the key to using this site is to set up regular e-mail reminders for designated goals, or even use an Automator hack, or similar automation program that opens the website for you on a regular basis so you can review the goals you set.

The beauty of using 43Things is looking back over your list of accomplishments and writing reflections about how you did or did not achieve a particular goal. Dedicated users of the service can help one another stick to their resolutions.

Members of 43Things are already setting New Year’s resolutions for 2012. Some of the top goals include losing weight, reading books, getting more sleep, and taking charge of personal finances.

What are your New Year resolutions so far? Do you have a website or other resource you use to keep track of your resolutions? Let us know about it.

For other ideas on goal setting, check out 100 Things to Do Before I Die: 6 Sites To Create Your Own List.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

I think you get the idea that there may be unique sources of inspiration for different people. Sometimes, you may find them not just in quotes, but also images and videos. Here are a few select media items that might just give you a bit of the directional boost that you’re looking for.

Photo by Jason Keath

Have your list of resolutions? This simple photo might help you face the potential obstacles coming your way in 2012.

Warhawk Matt Scott In Nike ‘No Excuses’ Commercial

This is an epic commercial, featuring basketball player Matt Scott from the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, giving a glimpse of the excuses that might set us back when trying to reach your goals.

Henry Ford

This was originally featured in a post from the ever-popular The Chive, which occasionally throws in inspirational quotes and images.

Jason McElwain’s Basketball Story

This inspiring story about a high school basketball team manager with autism shows that a lot of passion can help you overcome obstacles, achieve the unimaginable and lead you farther than you think.

How far, you ask? I don’t want to spoil the video for you, but let’s just say Jason was able to meet the President of the United States after his story went on the news. Passion is definitely key to keeping you motivated in order to complete a task in your New Year’s Resolutions.

Age Is Just A Number

If one of your resolutions includes to exercise more in an effort to become healthier, here’s a cool video that shows you can become a more active person at any time. You don’t need the latest equipment or a personal trainer.The key is to stick to a routine. Watch the following video as the interviewee reveals his age and shows off the body of a 20-year old.

If what you want is to find quotes or inspiring items specific to a theme, we have gathered some excellent sources of inspiration for all types of niches, including creative writers, entrepreneurs and business owners, parents, and even hackers. If perhaps you’re seeking advice to help you accomplish the tasks on your New Year’s Resolutions, here are six useful online tools, and another six websites here.

If you haven’t completed your list of resolutions, here are some more tips on finding manageable and worthy tasks, and here is a simple but effective way to organize those tasks so you’ll have a nice way to visualize your goals for 2012.

How are you keeping yourself motivated to complete your New Year’s Resolutions? Let us know in the comments!

Image credit: Shutterstock

Could it be because we let one day pass on to the next instead of really tracking our goals? Probably it is…as we fail to focus on the boring steps while trying to keep half an eye on the lofty goals. If changing habits and reaching for goals, a matter of routine, then RoutineTap is the personal tracking tool you can turn to.

Self-Motivation with RoutineTap

RoutineTap tracks your progress towards a goal with the help of raw data. The data is gleaned from the information you put in daily with the help of questions and answers. Think of it as a self-survey tool. RoutineTap helps you set up a series of questions related to the goal you want to work on. The answers to these questions determine the progress which is charted by RoutineTap.

For instance, let’s say that you are training to prepare for a marathon. You can set up RoutineTap with a question like – How many kilometers did you run today? (Alternatively, it could be a simpler – Did you run today?). Both of these questions will generate an answer: a number (e.g. 1 km) for the former; a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ for the later.

The answers represent raw data that can be plotted on a graph and tracked over course of time. RoutineTap believes that keeping track of this data could lead to habit changes as you visualize your progress over time.

For me, RoutineTap is a nice way to see the difference between the status quo and actual progress for the goals I have set for myself.

Track Progress with Questions

You can set RoutineTap to ask you different types of questions. That will depend on the goal you are planning to track. The screenshot, and the left panel, show the different types of questions that can be set up – from simple yes-no types to the more detailed textual types (not visible in the screenshot). You can create as many questions as you wish in your questionnaire. The more questions you set, more detailed will be the tracking. Multiple questionnaires can be created but only one is active at any point in time.

The only hitch is that if you are tracking any sort of expense, RoutineTap works with Euros. I am trying to track my running efforts. My first question looks like this:

Set up multiple questions. You can change the order by dragging and dropping the questions in place. Click the black cross if you want to delete a question.

To stick to your resolve and to maintain motivation to follow through with RoutineTap, try to keep the questions simple so that you just to spend handful of minutes each day updating the RoutineTap daily entries. You can use the calendar to go back to any date and fill in the answers in case you missed a day somewhere. Here is a screenshot with the questions I had set up for myself. For each day, you have to take just a few minutes and answer them,

Monitor Habit Patterns with Graphic Reports

The Reports section displays all the data you have accumulated with the help of your answers. Here are the tracking results in the form of colorful graphs. You cam mouse over the graph to see the numbers for that graph. The graphs give a clear indication if you are on the fast track with your goal or flagging off now and then.

Consistency of Habits

It’s a thumb rule that says anything done over the course of 21 days becomes a habit. I don’t know about that one, but if you can keep to your purpose with the help of this simple app, you would have taken big strides. RoutineTap motivates you to track your days and the hope is that a rising graph would motivate you to stay the course. If RoutineTap does not do it for you, here are a few more:

• Form Good Habits and Break Bad Ones With Habitforge
• 5 Online Tools To Help You Keep Your New Year Resolutions
• Form Healthy Habits & Get Rid of Bad Ones With Success Log & Fail Log [Android 2.1+]
• Manage Your Life with Free Online Time Management Tools

Do you like to break free from the staid and the humdrum? What habits have you decided to change? Give us your take on RoutineTap.