Ask HN: How do you track your personal goals?
I wonder if you just have a todolist or if you have other ways to break your goals down into actions that you can execute on on a daily basis, to break through the noise of every day life...
You then tack on automatic cards which appear on a schedule (e.g. "take out the trash," "clean this," "fix that," etc) and you have a even more useful productivity tool. You could of course use a traditional digital calendar for these with reminders, but pop-up reminders can be distracting/overwhelming, or ignored. A Trello card can sit in a bucket waiting until you have time in your schedule.
You can then combine it with something like the Pomodoro Technique[1] to help with uncontrolled procrastination.
Best of luck!
PS - There are other competitors to Trello which offer a great list experience (e.g. KanBanFlow, Microsoft Planner, etc). They're all good. Unfortunately few offer the Card Repeater. KanBanFlow offers built in Pomodoro timers tied to particular cards which is a huge win (Trello has third party support for Pomodoro timers, but that doesn't follow you cross-device).
[0] https://blog.trello.com/trello-card-repeater [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
(It actually doesn't repeat automatically, but you can copy monthly tasks down to the day). I also have it doing a little bit extra, tracking completion rates.
Complice has you set goals up, optional milestones, optional reviews weekly and monthly, and the biggie is daily intentions. You set your todos or intentions daily. Intentions are also set using which goal an intention is geared toward. You can have repeating or saved intentions too. It’s hard to describe because it’s pretty unique. It also has virtual coworking rooms. I hover usually in one of them[1].
I do use Complice in tandem with Omnifocus. I use Omnifocus to store big picture planning and all the tasks I want to do in the future. Then on a daily basis I set intentions for the tasks I want to do that day in Complice.
Some pages have notes of stuff I think about during the day (for future goals). Mostly, though, I have per-day todo lists. I leave a blank line between items to add optional metadata later, like scheduled/due time, category, time estimate, when I started and when I finished.
I chose paper media because it makes it easier to experiment with different formats. The pocket form factor allows me to carry it everywhere.
When I want to track my goals and progress on a software project, though, I opt for org-mode in emacs. It's mostly because it's faster to type than to handwrite and staying on the computer keeps me in tune. Also, it gives tremendous freedom to organize notes and tasks. There's a lot of features and minimal clutter despite that.
It's too bad it's lacking a good android app.
Sometimes that goal is simply getting my job done - get enough sleep, get up early.
Sometimes it's to learn something, read a book, finish a personal project, get a job, win a game. In these cases I'd break down what I need to accomplish these tasks, along with a plan.
Sometimes it requires more information and so the plan becomes to set the timeline.
The biggest issue in this field is that there's a bottomless amount of interesting things to do. So if you do whatever just feels interesting, you bounce from one thing to the next without really getting anything done in depth.
I was using Trello for a while but found the UI to be a bit of a pain as both mobile and desktop require a lot of horizontal scrolling and it was hard to take a high-level view of upcoming tasks. Maybe I was just using it wrong.
In order to accomplish goals, I set regular repeating tasks that I do to help me accomplish the goal. For example, I want to learn Spanish, so every day my task is to study 3 new Spanish words and once per week I review the words I learned.
I found if a goal (like a software task) was too broad, it wouldn't get accomplished. Breaking my goals down into small repeating tasks has helped me accomplish them.