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.

To-do lists are not necessarily the most exciting applications ever, and the UI for most Android apps is often on the bland side. That’s the starting point for Any.DO, and it takes these two dull facts, shakes them up, and turns Android to-do lists into something compelling, fun, and dare I say, sexy. If you want to see how a humble to-do list app can get over 1,100 Market reviews with a 4.5-star average within a short while after launching, just keep reading.

Getting Started with Any.DO

When you first launch the app, it shows a quick-start tutorial:

It’s a simple tutorial consisting of a few slides; the most noticeable thing is the typography, which is very different from the stock Android font. Slides are short and to the point:

Adding Tasks

Adding a task couldn’t be simpler, really. The textbox for doing this is already active when you reach the main screen; you only have to start typing, and the app provides auto-complete hints:

You can also tap the microphone button and use Android’s built-in speech recognition. Once you add the task, the screen looks like this:

One drawback is that the app doesn’t respect Android’s date display preferences, and defaults to mm.dd.

There is no “Done” tick box; to mark a task as done, just swipe it from left to right, as if crossing it out with your finger. In general, note how simple the layout is: The due dates are today, tomorrow, this week, and later. You can’t really set a specific due date other than those; to move the task between these dates, just drag it. There are no tags, but there are folders, shown in the task options:

These are the options shown when you single-tap a task. Again, simplicity is key here. You don’t get multiple levels of priority – you can either mark tasks as “priority” or not, and the mark is a thin red bar on the left side of the task:

The folders are synced with Google Tasks (the task management service built into Gmail). In fact, the whole thing syncs with Google Tasks (optionally). The reminder dialog looks like something out of a Microsoft concept video, and I mean that as a compliment:

A full calendar, an option to set the task to repeat, and not a default Android UI control in sight. This whole thing screams “custom design” – I wish all Android apps looked this clean. I also wish I could get as excited about the Notes interface, which looks like this:

These are per-task notes. For some reason, they are designed as one-liners; meaning, when you tap the “Add a note” field, it doesn’t expand. You can add multiple one-line notes about a task, which is nice, but I would expect the app to let me enter and edit a lengthy note with ease.

The Options Menu

When you hit the Menu button, most Android apps pop up a small menu at the bottom of the screen. Any.DO does this instead:

The JPG compression isn’t doing the typography justice here; the fonts are very thin, but are super-smooth on my Samsung. You can set the sort order, clear all the tasks, turn on the Google Tasks sync (it’s off by default, which is nice), and look at all of your done tasks. The “More” button opens a host of other options:

“Shake” means you can shake your device to clear all done tasks. You can also pick a dark theme if you like to plan the next day late at night.

Final Thoughts

If you care about Android, you should be paying attention to Any.DO. It’s a great to-do Android app; but more than that, I think it’s an important UI proof of concept, and it brings something truly new to the table. I could see a music player done up in this style, or a device automation solution (Tasker-like).

What do you think about the UI? Would you like to see other apps done in the same style, or do you like the Android default look better?

I’d like to take you on a tour of two different Android task manager that can help you do this.

Routinely [2.1+]

The first app we’re going to be looking at is free and currently enjoys a four-star market rating with 113 reviews – Routinely.

As you can see, the layout is fairly simple and inviting. The app is made up of a single list of tasks, where each task gets two lines. Unfortunately, longer task names get truncated – you can see it on the last task above, where I’m supposed to check how many veggies we still have. While Routinely is simple, it still offers some options for every task:

You can set the days in which a certain task is to be done; for example, I don’t want to sort out the shelves on Friday, so I just disabled this task on Fridays. You can also set up routine notifications, and configure the time for each notification.

One thing I really like about Routinely is that it lets you see how you’re doing at a glance. Here’s what you get when you tap on a task:

So I cleaned out the coffee table and the sofa just once (today). The calendar view only becomes handy once you’ve been using the app for a while, but it looks like this:

This is a very useful view, both for motivating yourself and for showing others that you have been carrying your own weight around the house. Routinely also offers two simple graphs, showing the total done tasks per month or per day of week.

I really like its simple aesthetic. If you don’t have a complicated routine, Routinely might be the way to go.

Chore Checklist Full [1.6+]

The other app I’d like to show comes in two flavors – Chore Checklist Lite (free) and Chore Checklist Full, which costs around $1.50. I will be looking at the full version, which looks like this:

The first thing you may notice is that unlike Routinely, Chore Checklist supports multiple routines. Whether this is a good thing or not is up to you. Some people may find this needlessly complex, while others actually need it for their complex lives. Each routine has its own settings:

You can set the whole routine to repeat in certain intervals; so you can set up a routine for things you do only once per quarter, or even every six months. The single item properties are similarly complex:

And the screen actually continues down to let you select the reminder type and even the specific sound used for that task:

I’ve been using Chore Checklist for some time now, and I have had an issue with the reminders. The application is superb, but the reminders simply don’t always pop up. After checking with the Chore Checklist tech support, I suspect this is specific to my own device and use case. However, if you plan to make heavy use of reminders, I would suggest you try out the free version first.

Chore Checklist also comes with its own simple widget, which looks like this:

You can select one of five different sizes for the widget. Whether or not you actually want your chores sitting on your home screen is an entirely different matter.

Final Thoughts

I think there is no clear winner here – it all comes down to personal preference. I really like how Routinely looks, and I like the fact that it saves a history of your past performance. On the other hand, Chore Checklist feels more powerful.

What do you think – which one seems better? Or maybe you know of a chore-busting Android task manager that leaves both of these in the dust? Tell us in the comments!

Image Credit : ratterrell

The beauty of Coolendar is that even though it has a simple interface, it quickly becomes very clear that the online organizational tool is not the least bit simple. It is an innovative way to make scheduling and organizing tasks more efficient. It does this by making the ability to add new tasks or events as quick and painless as possible, while making the highest priority items displayed in a way that will maintain your focus on those tasks until they are done.

Simplify Your Schedule With Coolendar

The first thing that struck me when I visited the Coolendar site is its simplicity. Logging into the site doesn’t even require a sign-up, you can just log in using your Google account. In fact, the simplicity was initially a turn-off to me, and I almost didn’t even bother writing about it. But then, I noticed an odd line below the task entry field with various time period filters – and what’s up with the red dot?

It didn’t take too long playing around with Coolendar to see that there are a bundle of awesome organizational and planning features buried underneath the facade of simplicity.

For example, there is an intelligent “engine” of sorts that’s buried within the task entry field. You can type certain keywords that instantly flag the built-in calendar to format your task entry in a certain way. This lets you create your calendar on the fly, one task entry at a time.

As you can see above with my two to-do task items without a date, you can also just enter straight to-do items. These will also show up on your list as you enter them. All of the items are initially just added to your schedule list, organized by date. You can also go beyond the standard date syntax and just type simple words like “tomorrow”, and the calendar engine immediately looks up the date for you and adds that date to your task item.

You can do the same with real days of the week. Coolendar is smart enough to know that if you type “Friday”, that you mean this coming Friday, and it’ll automatically add the correct date to the front of your task. This approach completely streamlines the process of adding new events to your Calendar because you don’t have to point and click any pop-up calendars – just type. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

If you forget any of the commands or available syntaxes, just click the “?” next to the task entry field and a pop-up guide will appear with examples.

Want to quickly organize your to-do list with your calendar items? No problem, it’s as simple as grabbing your to-do items on the list and dragging them to the location in the calendar where you want it to be. This lets you prioritize your date-less to-do items alongside the events or appointments you’ve entered into Coolendar.

Another nice feature is the filter bar at the top, with “all plans” on the left. By default, all of your calendar/to-do plans are shown on your list, but you can filter the list to only show today’s or tomorrow’s items, the week’s items, or a special “red dot” flag.

The way this works is you “flag” certain top-priority items by clicking the red dot to the left. This way you can click the red dot on the filter bar and view just those items.

It doesn’t take very long using Coolendar that you start to realize just how much better this format for a calendar is over the traditional grid-style calendar. With the Coolendar format, the critical items that require your focus and attention are at the very top of the list, where your eyes naturally gravitate to. This style of Calendar helps you to remain on task and work through your plans, whether they are dated or not. You make the priorities and then accomplish each goal. Checking off the “Done” checkmark on the right side of the task or planned event becomes a very gratifying act.

One final, very cool feature is the ability to “tag” keywords in your plans. By adding a hash in front of a word, you transform it into a “tag” – a searchable keyword that you can use to find all tasks related to a particular thing or place.

Even though I used to be an avid user of Google Calendar and WorkFlowy, I do have to say that Coolendar has me hooked and convinced that it may be a much better option. Staying focused is my one major weakness, and this looks like a perfect scheduling system that can help with that.

It also helps that Coolendar is accessible just about anywhere you are – from your Android device, on your iPhone or iPad and even from your GTalk account (just invite coolendar@appspot.com and type “help“).

Give Coolendar a try and see if it helps you to stay more organized and on task. Share your thoughts and experiences about the service in the comments section below.