It’s a neat idea similar to IMDB, where TV shows are listed, actors are noted and the individual outfits worn in each episode are given their own page, dedicated to finding the best match. It’s still in alpha stage so far, but it’s clearly going to be a hit. This method of browsing TV shows and actors, then cruising directly to shopping links from the site is precisely what shoppers want.

Log In With Facebook

There’s no need to log in, but if you want to do so, your Facebook login will allow you to collect your favourite outfits for referring to later. It’s also useful if you want to contribute to the similar items for outfits you’ve seen on Curvio.

Browse TV Shows

To begin with, Curvio has started with a small selection of TV shows, which include Gossip Girl and Glee. Despite the small number of TV shows available currently, this is still a great number of actors, episodes and outfits.

Browse The Stars

Check out the Stars page to find a character with your taste in clothing. Or perhaps you could look up an actor with your colouring or body shape if you want to get some good ideas about what might suit you.

Browsing Clothing Items

Once you’ve clicked on an actor, you see a page of their best outfits. Each of those outfits has its own page where you can see all the outfits people consider to be similar. Prices are easy to spot and it clicks straight through to somewhere you can purchase the clothes. It’s pretty much ideal.

Launch Status

The Curvio site is really new and is yet to grow in scope and see the community support which will supply the very best similar clothing links. However, there’s still a lot of great exploring that can be done as it is – and you know that it’s only going to get better.

If you’re a fan of Curvio, contact the staff and let them know which TV shows you’d love to see next or which retailers they could team up with. Curvio staff have said they’re keen to work with small fashion designers as well, so if this is you and you’re looking for some exposure, then talk to them now!

More Fashion

Check out some more fashion posts you might like  here:

• Velvet Brigade – Show Off Your Fashion Style With A Chance To Get Your Designs Made
• Do You Have A Photo Of A Great Fashion Item? Here Is How To Find Out Where To Get It!
• Use Polyvore To Create Or Find A New Fashion Style For Yourself
• 5 Style Websites To Buy Cheap Trendy Clothes

Which TV shows should Curvio add next?

Inspiration and motivation comes to each of us in many forms. For some it could like in words of wisdom, for others it could lie in uplifting images, and for a few it could be in a germ of an idea.

The Android universe has an app for most of our inspirational needs, so let’s check out the Android Market and see which motivational Android apps can give us the daily dose of motivation that we need when we flag off.

Inspirational Quotes

Inspiring quotes are probably the easiest way to motivate ourselves by a little each day. There are quite a lot of quote collections that can be found by the way of apps, but this one is the most popular. Unlike the one-quote-a-day variety, you can refer to the wisdom sayings any time you want. The app is also well designed with very few controls. You can easily share a liked quote with your social network and there could be many in the 670 quotes that this app carries. It works with Android 1.6 and above.

GoalTracker

Motivation falls by the wayside if you don’t have goals to aspire to. GoalTracker helps you keep sight of your goals. GoalTracker is simple to set up – you list your goals one at a time and assign it to two types. Yes/No for things like – Did I exercise today? Numeric for things which you need to quantify like the number of pages you read. Each individual goal can be assigned an interval (daily, weekly, monthly), start and end days, and a target value which is like the score for achieving this particular goal. You can put different goals in different categories and also embellish the goals thumbnail with pictures. You can track goals every day and also set reminder alerts. It works with Android 1.6 and above.

The Bucket List

Remember when we talked about the Bucket List? Looking at the response that came in made me realize that most of us have one tucked somewhere. This free Android app helps you create one on your phone. It’s the to-do list for your entire life. You can share your list with others and get inspired and also inspire others along the way. The Bucket List allows you to easily enter your life to-dos and set their priority levels. You can cross each one as you set out to achieve them. It works with Android 1.5 and above.

Rainbow Idea

Ideas can motivate us. More so if you decorate them with colors. And Rainbow Idea is a dead simple Android app that takes ideas and arranges ideas around colors. Ideas can be given any color out of the seven colors of the rainbow for one particular theme. Ideas can be displayed as color circles, blocks, or list. The developer likens the app to a simple mind map. It works with Android 1.6 and above.

Meditation Helper

All the wisdom in the world won’t be able to help you if you cannot quiet your mind. Zen and the art of meditation would be a bit farfetched to attain in a short time, but you can start with short bursts of meditation. The Meditation Helper is a timer which helps you along by allowing you to set a target and logging how many consecutive days you are hitting it.  If practice makes perfect, then this app attempts to aid you in that with its simple start and end chime. It works with Android 2.1 and above.

The other meditation timer you can take a look at is Meditation Support Timer.

Also check out: The 100 Best Android Apps

Here’s hoping these five motivational Android apps give you a better range to work with when you hit the dips. Do you have an Android app installed that injects some inspiration or motivation each day? Let us know about it in the comments.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

So a cheap apartment in the suburbs might end up costing you more money than one in the city, if you end up needing to burn expensive fuel anytime you leave the house. Combine that cost with the hidden expenses of driving, from wear and tear on your car to the risk of an accident, and the advantages of walking become clear pretty quickly.

WalkScore helps you figure out how walkable any address is, helping you determine an important part of a given home’s value. It is a perfect tool to supplement any housing search. To quote their website:

Our vision is for every property listing to read: Beds: 3 Baths: 2 Walk Score: 84. We want to make it easy for people to evaluate walkability and transportation when choosing where to live.

This is an admirable goal. Walking increases quality of life, so why shouldn’t it be a key part of any housing search? We’ve shown you the top 5 apartment search sites already. WalkScore makes all of them better by focusing on one important factor. It officially works in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; other countries might work as well but not fully.

Checking Any Address

Head to WalkScore and enter an address. You’ll then see a map and a collection of results:

This is the main way you’ll use the site: doing research on any potential apartment or house you’re thinking about living in. You’ll see a run-down of nearby essentials, ranging from groceries to entertainment to schools. You’ll also see an overall score for the address, giving you a way to compare its walk-ability with other addresses.

Don’t have a particular address in mind? You can bring up a list of neighborhoods in just about any city.

This will give you an idea of areas you might want to check out during your housing search.

Another factor to consider: how will you be getting to work? Walk Score lets you calculate your commute time and how much it will cost. Whether you plan on driving, walking, biking or taking the bus, this tool covers it all.

Once you figure out your commute costs, you can calculate the overall costs of living in a particular place. There’s a built-in tool for doing this:

You can combine your rent and your commuting costs with this, giving you an idea of the hidden costs of a cheap, car-dependent home. Remember, living in the suburbs may seem cheaper, but the total cost of commuting and rent might add up to more. Using this tool lets you determine whether that’s true or not in your situation.

How Does It Work?

So how does this site calculate Walk Scores? Good question. The site’s creators explain:

The Walk Score algorithm awards points based on the distance to the closest amenity in each category. If the closest amenity in a category is within .25 miles (or .4 km), we assign the maximum number of points. The number of points declines as the distance approaches 1 mile (or 1.6 km) – no points are awarded for amenities further than 1 mile. Each category is weighted equally and the points are summed and normalized to yield a score from 0–100. The number of nearby amenities is the leading predictor of whether people walk.

This seems reasonable to me, and I’m finding the tool very useful. I want to hear from you guys, though. How walkable is the place where you live? Share scores below, along with any other sustainability tools I might not know about.

If you own an Android smartphone, it is probably your constant companion throughout the day (and the night, too, but let’s not go there). Today, I would like to share two simple, fun and free Android apps that you can use to monitor your water intake and be reminded to drink more often.

Water Your Body [1.6+]

Water Your Body is one beautiful app:

As you can see, it’s ad-supported, but they need to make money somehow, right? The shelves look a lot like iBooks shelves, only instead of books, you fill them with cups and bottles showing how much water you’ve been drinking throughout the day. When you first start the app it asks for your weight (and assumes 65kg) and then decides how much water it thinks you should be drinking every day. I have no idea where it comes up with that number, and I see no reason to place too much stake in it. But as a tracker, it is just lovely. Right by the daily water dosage there’s a cup with an arrow. Tapping it lets you set your default cup:

I love this feature, because throughout a typical day, I am likely to drink water out of one of several typical containers. Water Your Body lets me configure those cups and bottles in advance, gorgeous icons and all. Once you select a default cup, a short tap on the shelf would log that cup. You can also press and hold to pop up a menu that would let you specify a different cup.

If the cup sizes and icons aren’t right for what you need, just hop on over to the Settings menu:

You can now enter the Setting Cup option and fill in the list with whatever cups and volumes work for you:

The settings screen is also a good place to discuss the app’s reminder feature. You can have the app prompt you to drink throughout the day, at set intervals. A reminder is a message shown in the notification bar, along with a sound to draw your attention. I highly recommend changing the default sound: It’s a “running water” effect, and I leave it to your imagination what it looks like when you’ve got the phone in your pants pocket and suddenly the reminder goes off. Awk-ward.

Carbodroid [2.1+]

Carbodroid is a much simpler app, but is very cute. You’ve got four configurable containers (you get to set the volume), and a parched Android in the background. Tap a container (to show that you just finished drinking it), and watch what happens:

Ooh, Mr. Android looks a bit less gloomy already. That’s encouraging! Let’s finish another bottle and see how our droid feels:

Much, much better. And let’s round it off with the ultimate achievement, drinking enough water for one whole day:

I’m not entirely sure about their grammar there (I “have drunk” enough water?), but the message is clear. And once we tap the Awesome button, it reveals one seriously overjoyed droid:

If only water could make me this happy in real life. The settings dialog is straightforward, and lets you set your own daily consumption goal, container volumes, and reminders:

Final Thoughts

Water Your Body is a gorgeous app, and it is definitely more full-featured than Carbodroid. You can set more containers, and the graphics are gorgeous. On a less positive note, I don’t like having it decide how much water I should drink per day, without even explaining how it arrives at that number. Carbodroid is much simpler, but it’s also cuter, at least in my opinion.

So, no clear winner here, but I do think that any of them is likely to get you to drink more water. Try them out and tell me which one works better for you!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

I am also intrigued by the other way around – devices and apps that have the ability to affect your brain. Jackson seems to be equally as intrigued as I. In 2009 he wrote a couple of cool articles covering just such apps, like his list of apps that help you sleep, relax or concentrate. His list of 9 iPhone apps that help you sleep were along the same lines as well. This week, I was complaining at work about being tired and not getting enough sleep, and one of my colleagues mentioned that I might want to consider trying binaural beats.

Improving Your Life With Binaural Beats

“Binaural what?” you ask.

That’s right, binaural beats – sounds of varying frequencies that, when played in each ear, supposedly produces a sort of “resonant frequency” in the center of the brain that can actually induce a specific mental state. The evidence for this interesting brain artifact comes from published research at the University of Florida, the University of California, and discussed in publications like the MIT Press and Scientific American.

If you want to try this phenomenon for yourself and you have an Android, you can. The goal with the apps I’m going to review in this article is to play those frequencies long enough to induce your brain toward that desired mental state.

Binaural Beats Therapy

If you’re ready to try this out, I highly suggest you first download my favorite app, Binaural Beats Therapy. This app consists of 7 preset frequency configurations that will play a carefully modulated tone in each ear, in order to produce the desired mental state that you choose in the main menu.

The display screen while the tone is playing is fairly boring – just flashing dots on the screen or the entire screen may flash different colors.

The audio itself is pretty high quality, and with this app there doesn’t seem to be any lag at all, even for audio that lasts about 2 hours.

Brainwave Tuner Lite

A similar app is Brainwave Tuner Lite, which has only three selections to choose from – one for each major “state of mind”. That includes “sleep and healing”, “meditation and relaxation” and “Focus and Learning”.

It took me a while to choose between using this one or the previous app the majority of the time that I was writing this article. I like the constant tone of Binaural Beats Therapy – Brainwave Tuner fades in and out, which I don’t particularly like. However, it does have a more creative screen while the sound is playing, which I do like.

One of the things that my colleague described to me is an iPhone app he uses to run through an entire program of frequencies. That’s really what I want to do, so I continued hunting for just such an app.

Binality

I found such an app in Binality. Like the previous two binaural beat apps, Binality offers a decent list of target mental states that you may want to pursue. These include concentration, lucid dreaming and meditation and more. Although, I’m not so sure about the “out of body experience” option…

What I really like about this app is the display while the tone is playing. It shows you the entire programmed frequency range as the program works its way through it.

You can jump around if you’d like by choosing a spot on the control bar, but I hear that you get the best results if you allow the entire program from start to finish.

edenBeats

Another interesting binaural beats app is edenBeats. It offers far fewer options as far as preset frequency tones – the menu only lists four at the moment – but the app is much more flexible because it allows you to alter each frequency as you see fit.

The tone generation screen allows you to turn off or on each base and beat frequency settings if you want to.

Best of all, you can create your own custom binaural beats from scratch if you want – and if you really know what you’re doing.

One-Use Binaural Beat Apps

There are two other apps that I should mention briefly. These are intended to be used for one particular purpose – as very targeted therapy. The first app is called Confidence Now. Be forewarned, when you first launch the app, you’ll need to download multiple large files, so try to do it while on Wi-Fi.

Confidence now offers a very long session created by certified hypnotherapist David Ridgeway, which takes you through relaxation, hypnotic induction, and the main session where Ridgeway makes hypnotic suggestions to improve your confidence, with a binaural beat in the background.

The last app is one that claims it can help people that suffer from depression, called Depression Help. This is a very simple app that just plays one preset setup of tones which the app creators claim can eventually alleviate symptoms of depression.

As to its effectiveness, I can’t really say. The comments area for the app has about half of the users saying it worked and half saying it did zilch.

So why not give binaural therapy a shot, and see if you notice any impact in your daily life. If you’re always tired, groggy or distracted, maybe one of these apps could give you the mental boost that you need. If you do give any apps a try, let us know how it works out. And if you know of any other cool Android apps similar to these, please share them in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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!

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Shutterstock, Shutterstock, Shutterstock

I took into consideration that quite a bit of the blouses, skirts, and shoes on this site look fairly similar to the stuff in my girlfriend’s closet, so I figured that it has to be good. As far as I know, she has taste, so ladies, this post is for you.

Find Rare Items And Accessories

I’d liken this site to being a fashion aggregator, utilizing a social networking type of system to bring its users together so that they can share links of clothing and accessories from all over the Internet. What I noticed was that quite a bit of the site includes either hand-made or not-very-well-known items (and yes, a great deal of mainstream products), so if you’re into appearing unique and different, then this site is for you. Granted, there isn’t only clothing on this site, but it’s safe to say that it’s the main selection.

What I did like about the site was the fact that it offered a system of collections in which users can find similar items. It was through the collections that I discovered that there were a few men’s items on the store as well as places to buy candy. In addition to this, there are collections of apartment furnishings, iPhone accessories, and even bridal adornments. Honestly, I think it’s pretty cool that you can find all this stuff online.

Build Up Your List Of Fav Selections

Since Wanelo is primarily user-generated, you can trust that it’s not just one solitary person or company throwing what they think looks good at you. Chances are that there are a few individuals on Wanelo who think like you do (albeit this concept of appearing unique), and one of the features of the site gives you the option to follow them and stay updated on their top picks. Furthermore, if you fancy a certain merchant’s products just as much as your friends’ selections, you can follow the stores themselves on the site.

One of the cool options that Wanelo has to offer is its toolbar button, and this is used in the same exact way that you would use StumbleUpon. If you find something, just click the toolbar button, and voilà – you have successfully contributed to the community clothing melting pot. Alternatively, you can just punch in the URL on Wanelo itself, but really, what fun is that?

Share Your Finds

Based on what I found on the site, Wanelo is also used as a means to share your style with your friends. What does that mean? Well, as they say, this means no more ugly Christmas sweaters as gifts (bet you wish I had written this sooner). Furthermore, you can find out what your friends like, so when a proper time to give gifts comes around, you can get what they want with no awkward questions asked.

Conclusion

I’m not going to veer away from my standard flannel shirts, but chances are you might find something pretty nice on here (and yes, that goes for the men, too). However, all in all, this site is very well made, and it does exactly what it is designed to do. That’s the best thing that a site really can do – just keep it simple.

What kinds of things have you found using Wanelo? Do you know of any other sites like Wanelo?

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?