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.
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.
I always love it when I find a well-designed tool. A device works elegantly and without problems is even better than a work of art: Art’s just pretty. A well-engineered tool can make your life demonstrably better and be pretty. The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 is a perfect example:
This is easily the best scanner I’ve ever used. I spent the day scanning in my box of old notes from school (kept on the theory that it might be useful someday). The scanner had very few problems chewing through page after page of notes, from printed handouts to deteriorated notebooks.
And this thing is fast; I could never, ever have done this much scanning with a traditional flatbed scanner. If I had to scan each page, one at a time, first one side and then the other–I would never have bothered with this project, and I’d probably have dragged this box with me for the rest of my life, because "I might use it some day!"
Now I’m free of a box of clutter, and I’m much more likely to use this stuff, because it’s in easy reach. I have it in my computer sorted by class, rather than in a box where I’d almost certainly never find what I need.
norbauer at 43 Folders has a great post that goes into a lot more depth about the ScanSnap and when to use paper vs. computers. And he’s right: I’m a lot more likely to use paper for brainstorming and note-taking now that it won’t pile up and get in the way later. Just think, write, and scan.
