Have tried Plai (plai.team) for a few years, but I seem to be straying in an out of it (a lack of progress is my fault, not Plai's, just so we're clear.)
Do you have any other goalsetting tool that you personally use and largely outside work?
This is a problem I genuinely face and am working towards avoiding.
So I set up a global hotkey on my mac via icanhazshortcut that opens/generates a text file in Sublime Text with the current date in the filename and set up a hotkey within the editor to insert a timestamp. I've established a syntax that's basically [keyword] [number] that I can use for tracking food calories, fitness, etc. I can record I ate a couple of yogurts via just two keyboard shortcuts and typing 'yogurt 2'.
And now I'm building an app that reads and processes those files and puts stats in a database or exports to some app for analysis (just the former for now).
Columns - daily / weekly goals, rows - days. Every morning I fill in the previous day and reflect on the upcoming one.
I've tried a bunch of tools and also develop some of my own, but so far (~20 months) this simple solution has been the most effective and sticky for me.
This seems like the most straightforward, practical approach.
I am really considering building my own tools this time but I really wanted to get a feel of what worked for other people. I don't want to be in a situation where I have already committed to build something and halfway through, I find a simple-enough solution that works well.
But yeah, sheets is a great way to think about, probably the most objective.
A calendar to mark off days.
A design program to create a vision board.
A piece of paper or index cards to plan out each week and individual days.
You will naturally and immediately integrate both subjective emotional and logical energy into such a tool, and you probably already have some objective methodologies in mind from past experience. So it's a huge advantage. Just IMO.
Personally I wrote a bunch of my own tools and I found that they taught me a lot about what I really wanted. The tools came and went and new tools were built, but the general lesson-integration flow remains intact and that's the important part.
Prior to that I was too worried about systems maintenance and contingency planning to bother with putting my own tools together, but it turns out that this was easily worked around.
Good luck in achieving your goals.
Existing systems really solve an extreme user's issues or are too limited in their ability to be flexible to a user's (in this case, my) requirements.
Yeah, going ahead with the no-code/low-code solution seems most plausible.
The challenge is to not over-engineer it and make it an ambit for my own fallacies or lapses in behaviour. Keeping it light, balanced, and focused should be the priority.
I think the emotional side of things can come in a bit later as what I am looking for is that core, objective follow-up and motivation for task completion as well as a progress update on every weekend, month-end, and year-end.
I’ve tried so many different types of productivity systems over the years, but the ones have stuck for me are the ones that don’t overly prescribe how they’re supposed to be used and give you some implementation leeway.
I have white/cream color walls on which I put these stickies. 3 colors, low/med/high priority.
Write the goal, stick it on the wall, take it off when finished.
There’s something satisfying about ripping that note off the wall. The goal is to keep the wall as clear as possible.
Downside is that it’s not a digital practice and there’s no history.
It's focused on personal objectives, habits, time and behaviour tracking. It has also has an API and several integrations (including Health Kit).
For some of the methodologies you can implement with it (eg time based goals and habits), check out the guides[1].
A markdown file.
I do my daily journaling in a markdown file anyway (Today's Daily Note is `2022-08-22.md`).
I have a simple script to create today's Daily Note with `$ jrnl` and open it in my editor of choice (Which happens to be vim). The Daily Note is created by copying a template file.
The first header of that template is a simple markdown table with a column for each hour and 6 rows (each row for 10 minutes).
The table legend indicates a list of symbols (~/>/@/...) for each type of activity. As I organize my day by work-units of 1H (I work the Pomodoro way...), at the beginning of each 1H working session I just fill in the column of the previous hour with symbols representing how I spent it.
Hint: It should be filled with '>' symbols because that symbol represents the ONE most important task I need to achieve that day.
The second header of the template is a very short list of questions I force myself to answer every morning to reflect on my previous day (Which I call my 'Warming Routine'):
- What do I want to achieve today? - Was I able to achieve my goal yesterday? - What happened yesterday? - What am I grateful for?
Subsequent headers are the entries of my journal...
This minimalist tooling suits me perfectly because I tend to be very lazy so a lot of what I do isn't always properly logged. But entering 6 characters each hour (Remember the symbols for types of activity) is achievable even for a lazy dude like me :)
Another reason it suits me so perfectly is that I tend to live in my terminal anyway so it presents very low friction.
On top of that it's very easy to automate certain tasks: For instance, I tend to use a very light version of Zettelkasten to organize my thought/knowledge. So I have vim scripts to search my Knowledge base and to follow links to notes. So everywhere in my Zettelkasten notes, you'll find links to Daily notes in the form of `[[yyyy-mm-dd]]` which I open with a hotkey.
Mind you I didn't invent this method: I stole it from Ivaylo Durmonski and his [The Grid: Daily Planner for Better Time Management](https://durmonski.com/productivity/daily-planner-for-minimal...).
So all credits go to him.
Built for teams, not individuals. It's a great process, but it didn't seem to work for me.