The hardest part isn't making resolutions; it's keeping them. Here are 11 of the best apps and tools for setting and tracking goals.
Making resolutions isn't difficult; keeping them is the challenge. Luckily, there are some great tools to help you do just that—whether it's in your personal life or professional one. Eleven members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) share their favorites below.
1. Giant Post-it Notes
I love those two-foot square Post-it notes you can buy at office supply stores. They come in bright colors and I've adapted them to post up on my office walls. We use them to track contracts closed, income goals, social reach and web traffic. It's great if you like to physically write down the numbers and all you need is a pen to keep it up to date. – Kelly Azevedo, She's Got Systems
2. Way of Life App
I love the mobile app Way of Life. I have 25 goals that I track daily; everything from remembering to drink 60 ounces of water to major, big-picture goals for ZinePak. It's a quick, easy, intuitive way to keep up with things that might otherwise go undone. I love having a record of my performance and access to graphs to show my performance over time. – Brittany Hodak, ZinePak
Related Article: 12 Productivity Hacks for Entrepreneurs
3. Google Drive
Every year a friend and I get out of New York City and spend an entire weekend writing out our goals for the next 10 years, five years and one year in a shared folder in Google Drive. We break the one year goals down into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals. Each Tuesday at 7 a.m., we hop on a call to share news of where we are at and to hold one another accountable. It's been huge. – Mark Krassner, Knee Walker Central
4. Asana
Our team has used Asana for the past few years and we love it. We have dabbled with other programs such as Trello, but have always stuck with Asana in the end. For teams of fewer than 30 people, you can't beat the free price tag either. Project tasks can be assigned to a specific person and added to their overall to-do list, but the best part is how flexible it is to be used for many different purposes. –Andrew Hoeft, Pinpoint Software, Inc.
5. AnyDo
AnyDo is a very simple, elegant task manager with powerful features. The less on my list, the closer I am to reaching all my goals. I have a list for professional work and personal stuff and I always try to keep it as low as possible. – Ben Lang, Mapme
6. Wunderlist
Wunderlist is the tool I use to set my goals for the day, week and month. It’s great for helping me knock out the important items in an organized fashion. The ability to share lists for collaboration is a major plus. – Brock Stechman, DivvyHQ
7. JIRA and Confluence
I tested almost every task management tool out there until our dev team started using Atlassian's JIRA and Confluence. It works so well that all of our departments are now using it religiously. For my personal goals and to-do tracking, I like to keep it very simple and use Google Tasks. – David Henzel, MaxCDN
Related Article: 9 Most Effective Apps for Internal Communication
8. Confluence
Our team has used a combination of Confluence and Asana for just over a year now. Confluence allows our team to collaborate on goals, whether they're sales or development focused. Asana helps our team stay focused on the daily goals. You can set objectives for teams and individuals. Once they have completed a task it will notify you via email, website or their mobile app. – Dustin Cucciarre.
9. OKRs
Believe it or not we use a simple spreadsheet with Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) -- but it does the trick. Every employee in the company is expected to list four quarterly goals (three professional, one personal) and an action they’ll take to achieve those goals. We share the spreadsheet via the cloud so the entire company can read each other’s entries and hold each other accountable. – Jeff Fernandez, Grovo Learning, Inc.
10. Clear
Certain apps really have the potential to make themselves indispensable and Clear is one of them. As its name would suggest, Clear is a simple yet elegant to-do list app. It's hard to put my finger on why I find it so useful, but I think it's because it's just as easy and intuitive as pen and paper -- just with more features, multiple lists and regular reminders. It's clearly great. – Brian Honigman, BrianHonigman.com
11. A Whiteboard
I tried all of the other online tools and found myself using them once, forgetting about them and then going back to my whiteboard and pad of paper. I take about one to two hours to plan my monthly goals then break down those goals into weekly objectives, then daily tasks and to-do's to meet those goals. It works pretty well, as we grew over 200 percent this year. – Chris Brisson, Call Loop
Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program.