The Best Apps to Track Your Progress on Your New Year’s Goals
As 2024 approaches, it’s time to decide on the New Year’s resolutions you’ll spend the next 12 months trying to stick to. Writing down your goals is a key part of achieving them, so start there, but the “writing” part is a little broader than you think. Pen and paper is great, but so is an app if it works well for you and can work toward a long-term goal that sets the new year’s demands. Choosing the right app can be a little overwhelming as there are so many goal setting and tracking tools out there, so here are some of the best and what they do.
If you are using SMART goals: Strides
SMART goals (or rather specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) goals are popular among individuals and students, as well as groups and teams of employees, because they make it easy to describe goals and results. Strides is an app that makes them just as easy to track . It tracks your progress towards SMART goals, using bars to motivate you and reminders to help you develop habits. The simple version is free, but if you want unlimited trackers and the ability to see progress reports, you’ll pay $4.99 per month.
If you need to break down difficult goals: Todoist
Todoist is perhaps one of the most famous apps on the list. It’s popular for a reason: it helps you break complex projects into smaller ones, collaborate with teammates, and easily track progress, whether you’re working collaboratively or independently. A Kanban board is built in, so you can also track your goals from early stages to completion. For free, you can upload five personal projects and view a week’s activity history, but if you want longer-term tracking and up to 300 projects, you’ll have to pay $4 per month.
If you are very busy: TickTick
TickTick is created for people who have a lot to do. You can set “annoying alerts” to remind you of urgent or high-priority responsibilities several times a day, and you can use the voice conversion feature to dictate your to-do lists, because who has time to type all that? You can also set location-based reminders to pop up so that when you go to work, everything you need to do appears. When you complete your tasks, you earn achievement points, and if you don’t, your score goes down. Your score helps you level up (or, again, down), which gamifies it a bit by helping you track your progress. It’s free, but there’s a premium version for $35.99 per year that allows you to set high, medium, or low priority tasks and import third-party calendars. The premium offering also allows you to better track your progress, giving you access to historical statistics that let you see how far you’ve come towards achieving your goals.
If you’re serious about sticking to a schedule: Clockify
Clockify , which offers almost all of its best individual features for free, is best known as a scheduling app. But it’s also great for goal tracking because it’s schedule-based. You can track exactly how much time you spend on all your tasks, which is useful if you’re trying to figure out how much time to allocate to certain responsibilities when timeboxing or using another productivity planning method . Your dashboard will show you your personal statistics and trends related to your work time and goals, so you can start organizing your day around what takes up the most time and when you’re most productive. You can view reports of your progress—in varying degrees of detail—and there’s even a built-in Pomodoro timer. The best core features are free; you’ll only be charged $3.99 if you need to become an admin of someone else’s work.
If you want to gamify your goals: Habitica
Habitica encourages you to “gamify your life” as you strive to achieve your goals. You get a little avatar that grows and is rewarded when you complete your actual tasks, but punished if you don’t, so you can track your progress by simply seeing how well your little avatar is thriving. You’ll earn in-game currency that you can exchange for rewards, and there’s even a social component where your avatar can team up with others to participate in games.
If you crave simplicity: Joe’s goals
Joe’s Goals are amazingly easy to use—and that’s because they’re so old and they look so old. It’s a relic of a bygone Internet era, but the simplicity is almost comforting. While other apps have a seemingly endless stream of widgets and notifications, this web page simply asks you to enter your goals, track them, and track your daily “score.” Your goals are displayed in a grid along with the seven days of the week, and when you complete one of them on a given day, you simply put a little tick in the box. If visual tracking and simplicity are your thing, this is what you need.