Help Has Arrived
It’s almost New Year’s! For some people that marks the day to set new goals for the coming year. It is a hopeful time of year, and the phrase on everybody’s lips is “This year I’m going to…”. Goals range from establishing a new and personally valuable habit to shedding an old, bad habit. It is determination, confidence and a new strategy for goal accomplishment that rings in with the new year, as we resolve to succeed this time.
Goals come in all shapes and sizes. Some are huge, some are small. Some are finite, some are life-long goals. Some goals may be easier to reach than others. Some goals terminate in a single event. Such as, “This year I will take a cruise,” or perhaps “This year I will retire from work.” Other goals may be longer term goals. For example, “This year I am going to make a significant dent in my debt load,” or perhaps “This year I volunteer more of my time.” Perhaps you are setting goals to last your life time, for instance, “This year I will eat healthier so that I will feel better and live longer” or “This year I will quit drinking.” Our goals and our reasons for setting them are individual, personal and worthwhile.
How successful are you at reaching your annual goals? Have you made this goal before, over and over, and never quite get where you want to be? Sometimes it is a struggle, especially when trying to break bad habits. Many goal seekers need assistance in tracking their goals. Consistency does help establish new behaviors. There are several sites on the internet that offer goal tracking software, some are better than others; three popular ones are Habitmix, Joe’s Goals and Habittracker.
These three sites offer similar frameworks, such as listing your goals and tallying your success each day, but Habitmix offers details that are lacking in Joe’s Goals and Habittracker. Habitmix lets you put your commitment into statement form, which you can review each day. This is a valuable habit for busy lifestyles, and a necessary one to fully establish or extinguish specific behaviors. The simplicity and limitations of the other sites, Joe’s Goals and Habittracker, truly limit the depth of application. On Habitmix, you can prioritize goals and related behaviors and also add a time commitment to them separately. Doing so allows you to balance daily goals, weekly goals or longer ones simultaneously.
In Habitmix you get to put your core values into writing. Joe’s interface is simplistic, and it allows you to put check marks for accomplishing certain goals on a daily basis, while Habitmix allows you to break down the goal into the necessary steps, and mark the steps as they are accomplished each day. For a social connection and motivation you can connect your core values to your Facebook, MySpace, a blog or a website. Adding the touch of social pressure might be just the extra push you need.
Habitmix gives you the tools to break down your goals into manageable steps and monitor your own progress. By reading over your commitment statement daily, you are reminding yourself, even when life is chaotic, what you want to achieve and why. If your previous record of goal accomplishment has fallen a little short of where you want it to be, then check out Habitmix. The only time you truly fail is when you stop trying.
