Motivate Yourself To Achieve Goals By Putting Them Online
The year’s almost half over, and many of our New Year’s resolutions have already fallen by the wayside. If you have a difficult time sticking to your goals, weblog Web Worker Daily suggests success may lie in putting them online.
Photo by frli.
This is one of the ideas we’ve found to be more and more true over time. The Web Worker Daily post walks through a four-step process of vetting your goals through your closest friends, keeping everyone in the loop via social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and even broadcasting outside your network to stick with your goals.
For our part, we’d suggest that the online compenent isn’t necessary, but we do firmly believe that sharing your goals with friends is an excellent way to stick to goals by making those goals matter. It’s not just about the added pressure of not letting down the people you’ve involved in this goal, but the more your talk about it, the more it becomes a part of your daily life. Head to the post for a rundown of how they suggest putting your goals online, or share your experience motivating yourself with the help of others in the comments.
Achieve Your Goals by Putting Them Online [Web Worker Daily]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
I'd say from my experience trying goal-motivating sites is that stowing them away somewhere on the web is a recipe for ignoring and procrastination. The problem is that on some website they aren't explicitly in-your-face everyday unless you actively choose to navigate to the site, making avoidance a simple thing to passively do. But there are some tips in the article that help to make this idea work better, so I guess it could be a productive system for some people.
adjohnson916
Joe's Goals was one highlighted by lifehacker a couple of years ago. It has since grown quite a bit.
30sleeps.com is also a good site or sort term goals
AndiC
Oh I appear to have the first comment! :) Thats a first for me.
I usually use 43 Things, its a really good site as its part goal-list and part-social network, plus you can get the site to send you reminders periodically.
Alexander Ward
@Alexander Ward:
"First" comments (any comments acknowledging one's instance of commenting first on a post) will get you an irreversible commenting ban.
This idea works very very well - and it doesn't even have to be thanks to a website or other web service that helps your track your goals (although they definitely help keep you organized and motivated!) - sometimes the best way to make sure you continue to make progress on something is to make it public and let your friends and family read it.
Procrastinating and rationalizing works fine when you're doing it in your head to make yourself feel better, but it's a little different when there are other people outside your head who may poke holes in your "logic!"
I've been using [www.myweightracker.com] to mark my weight loss goal and track its progress. Seeing the charts with my goal marked and current progress does indeed make it more real than just knowing in my head what I want to achieve. They don't have any built-in sharing of the charts, but sometimes I do email a copy to my friends that are also trying to lose weight.
This is a great way to implement the idea I wrote about in the "Get Committed!" entry of my "Dare to Excel!" blog at [dare2xl.braveblog.com] (direct url [dare2xl.braveblog.com]). Very simply, the idea is to tell people. Doing it online seems very efficient, but it will help if you specifically point people who know you, to it, so that THEY can (as someone pointed out above) keep you accountable.
davearonson
@adjohnson916: The key is involving other people to hold you accountable. A web site doesn't care if you keep to your promises, but hopefully your friends do. (Or, more importantly, hopefully you *think* they do.)
I use Remember the Milk to set personal goal reminders. Then, I also use my blog to keep track of the 101 Things in 1,001 Days Project. Although I probably won't finish 100% of the things on my list, it's nice to have a timeline to follow, that is more than just a yearly new year's resolution list.
This is excellent advice that I usually follow myself. I do a webcomic and I don't think I would have kept up with it for as long as I have if I didn't feel like I had an obligation to post on schedule every single week. I do the same thing with friends and tell them what I'm going to accomplish for the month/year/whatever, and usually those goals get accomplished because I don't want them to say "hey I thought you were working on this-or-that" and have to reply "Yeah...I gave up on that."
It doesn't have to be online at all, but if someone else knows what you are trying to do there seems to be a little extra motivational push to accomplish your goals.