Setting a goal is easy. Working toward your goal while maneuvering the mundanities of everyday life is the hard part.
These fun websites and smartphone apps use ingenious ways that keep you on track to meet your goals on time.
1. Dollar Doer Club (Web)
Embarrassment is a powerful motivator. The Dollar Doer Club exploits your fear of embarrassment in a crafty way to help you reach your goals.
The Dollar Doer Club's 30-day Challenge sets the stage with two scenarios. Both scenarios offer innocuous proposals: pick a goal, pick an embarrassing phrase, and pick a friend.
Depending on whether or not you reach your goal in 30 days, you'll encounter two entirely different outcomes. If you reach your goal, and your friend confirms this with the Dollar Doer Club, you'll bask in the glow of the achievement with no negative consequences.
Alternatively, if you fail to reach your goal, the Dollar Doer Club will run 1,000 ad impressions in your city publicizing your failure. How's that for motivation?
2. Hijack Your Feed (Web)
Innocuous suggestions can sometimes be the best way to remind you to get something done. Hijack Your Feed is a browser extension that inserts reminders in your social feed from your personal to-do list.
Promising to turn your to-do list into "content worth consuming," Hijack Your Feed inserts unique posts into your Twitter feed for each to-do item. All of the posts aim to catch your eye, just like "real" ads.
Hijack Your Feed's interactive posts mean you can mark tasks as Done, or visit embedded links through the convenience of your social timeline.
3. Confetti Habits (Android, iOS)
What is the most effective way to achieve a goal? By breaking it down into small digestible chunks that you can complete each day. A smartphone app that reminds you to complete a small task each day is an efficient way to do this.
Confetti Habits is a habit tracker that emphasizes building positive habits in a fun and colorful way. Every time you complete a habit, Confetti Habits launches virtual confetti to celebrate your achievement. After all, working toward your goals is always a cause for celebration.
Avoiding bad habits is made easy with Confetti Habits. Your streaks (for example, a goal of 30 days without smoking a cigarette) are visualized as an unbroken chain in the app. Visualized streaks and progress charts will fuel you with motivation to continue your journey.
Download: Confetti Habits for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
4. BallerToDo (Web)
A simple to-do list isn't always the most effective way to organize your goals. You might find yourself feeling overwhelmed trying to prioritize what to do first in a traditional checklist of items.
BallerToDo uses an Eisenhower Matrix to help you organize like a baller and get stuff done. You can visualize your tasks along the X and Y axes, and prioritize tasks according to their Impact and Urgency.
Making a task is easy. Just click anywhere on the matrix and add a title. The task can be dragged around the matrix at any time to update its importance and urgency.
The user interface highlights the task with the highest score, taking the hard work out of prioritization. It's the closest thing to having a personal task manager who's there for you 24/7.
Powering Through the Daily Grind
Incremental day-to-day achievements are where the magic happens. Mount Everest cannot be conquered overnight. Likewise, achieving your goals requires daily dedication over a period of time.
Small daily accomplishments are the best way to reach long-term goals. Whether your motivation comes through the fear of embarrassment, visualized daily progress, or an unexpected reminder, small steps eventually pave the way to something big.