It’s January, the time of year when we start thinking about New Year’s Resolutions and what our goals will be for the fresh, sparkling year that has just begun! You may have visited the “43 Things” website – it’s a tremendously popular goal-setting community website. I think the key to its success is the interactivity – you can browse other people’s goals for inspiration and then click to say: “I want to do this too!” At the time of writing, there are 64,002 New Year’s Resolutions listed on the site, including everything from “Get a Master’s Degree” to “Keep a Plant Alive”.
To succeed at your goals, it’s important to view them as often as possible. That’s the reason I love this very simple yet very effective app. Visiting the 43 Things website is great, and inspiring, but once I’m inspired I need to choose my goals (carefully, as the app will only track up to 43 of them!) and then have them as close as possible to my person so that I can refer to them often.
Once you’ve entered your goals into the list on the app, you can track your progress by updating the % complete figure whenever you take a step towards one of your goals. Also very important to the process of staying motivated is the ability to add as many entries as you like – with photos – to each goal. Recording small successes on the road to your goal is a very powerful psychological technique to help you stay motivated.
Once you achieve a goal, you can tap the “I’ve done this!” button and start building your list of inspiring successes to refer to over and over again!
