Tag Archives: gtd

Joe’s Goals

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I’ve been trying out the Lifehacker-recommended Joe’s Goals for about a week now, and I’ve found it to be most useful.

Joe’s Goals Demo

It works like this: You give it a list of daily goals, which are listed on the side. Each day that you accomplish that goal, you click in the box, and it puts a neat little checkbox there.

You can also add logbooks, which are little tiny squares of text, rather than checkboxes.

The site also keeps stats, like the longest chain of days that you accomplished your goal and a point score at the bottom of each day. You can weight each of your goals a different amount, and you even track negative goals that deduct points.

So, for example, you can say that taking a picture once a day is worth 1 point, while working out for an hour each day is worth 5, and eating more than one snack a day is worth -2.

Overall, Joe’s Goals is a simple tool that I’d recommend to anyone trying to track their New Year’s resolutions.

Remember Everything with I Want Sandy

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I Want Sandy is a new web service that helps you keep track of all the details of your life. The software takes on the pesona of an administrative assistant that you contact by email. This makes the service really easy to work with.

For example, lets say you want to remember to get a card for your mom’s birthday. You would write Sandy an email with the message “Remind me to buy a card for Mom on 4/23.” A minute or two later, you’ll get a response from Sandy confirming what you just sent. Then, on April 23rd, she will send you an email reminding you to get the card.

The feature I most use is reminders: it’s really easy to write “remind me to call my insurance guy next monday at 2:00 PM,” as opposed to the fairly clunky process of adding a task with a reminder to my Blackberry. And with Sandy, I don’t see that reminder again until Monday at 2 PM, which means a less cluttered to do list. In GTD terms, I use Sandy as my electronic tickler file.

Plus, I can contact Sandy through direct messages on Twitter. This is best combined with the Twitterbar Firefox extension. Instead of opening up my email, I just type “d s remind me to pay my credit card 12/1 @monthly —post” into my location bar in Firefox. When I type the last “t” in “post,” TwitterBar sends a direct message to Sandy. This way, I don’t even have to open my email to save a reminder.

You can even call Sandy through the Jott speech recognition service. After you get it set up, you call the Jott hotline, ask for Sandy, and then say what you want to remember. Jott will convert it to text and send it to Sandy. It’s really easy.

Sandy’s recognition engine is fairly robust too; there’s a handy cheat sheet that lists most of her vocabulary. You can say abstract things like “r my appointment next monday afternoon” or have repeated items like “r go running @bidaily.”

There are a lot of great features I haven’t even touched on yet, like tagging, list and contact management, and shared reminders with friends. It’s easy to use and it’s free. Check it out at http://iwantsandy.com/.