Lets face it, sticking to goals is hard in general.  The article linked below was written about New Years Resolutions, but really, any goal is hard to stick with.  If your goal is to “clean my house” or “mow the yard” or even “do research to start a new diet”, there will always be things getting in the way of your progress.  Here are the top 10 quick tips to help you get the right start to accomplishing your goals:

10. Schedule your goals inside your high-energy times - this is pretty straight-forward

9. Make them S.M.A.R.T. - example of S.M.A.R.T. goal setting for exercise: Specific (”Run 2 miles, three times a week”); Measurable (”Improve my mile times by 25%”); Achievable (Avoid pie-in-the-sky goals that you can’t expect to achieve.); Realistic (Give yourself the time necessary to achieve the goal. Don’t expect overnight success.) Timely (Have a real deadline with progress check-ups; get your first 5K under your belt by Sept. 1, instead of “Run a long race this year”).

8. Mint.com for all your money resolutions - this is a good suggestion to just keep track of money goals altogether. We have a few articles that might help you with that as well: Financial Category

7. Channel your Inner Seinfeld—Don’t break the chain - start a process from day to do and keep track of your progress (like a chain of paperclips).  After a while, it will start to be more and more important to you to not break the chain, and it becomes a ritual.

 6. Track them all at once with Joe’s Goals - use a simple website like Joe’s Goals to track your goals.  Tracking progress is key.

5. Keep your reminders/motivators away from your computer - this is a trick to just keep you away from your computer, especially if the goal has something to do with exercise or cleaning.  Once you sit at your computer to keep track of the goals, you will be doing a million other things instead of working on it.

4. Remember the Milk - another great online task manager, Remember The Milk

3. Be a dweeb and write them down - put notes in your daily planner, track things on paper, review your progress

2. Advanced calendar tweaking - learn and use some advanced features in the calendars you already use like Outlook or Google Calendar

1. Remember Ryan Adams’ creed—It’s just a simple task today - start working on your small goals today.  Keep up with them and they will not become long difficult things to work on.  I mean, if you are planning for a marathon, you only need to run 2-3 miles today, and that is not too far.  Just go do it.

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I hope you enjoy these suggestions.  Follow the link below to read the entire original article.

Top 10 Tools for Sticking to Your Goals[lifehacker.com]

Here is a very simple website that lets you keep track of just two goals at a time.  The simplicity helps you to focus on just two really important tasks at a time.  As the website author says:

1. Set your goals.
2. Accomplish your goals.
3. Repeat.

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Two Goals [TwoGoals.com]