The catchy titled Joe’s Goals (run by Ian actually) is a very novel approach to tracking your tasks. It is a pointing system in which you create positive and negative tasks and indicate which you have done and how many times. With this data you will get a score and you will be able to see how you did.It’s a great way to stay in competition with yourself, since you will be striving to get better and better points.

For a more in-depth review, please do read on, or read the Hack Your Day Wiki Guide on Joe’s Goals for a full walkthrough of the app. Use it for reference, use it to learn, print it and mail it to friends, deposit $1.000.000 on my Paypal account, go crazy!

So recovering from my stroke above, I am ready to share some proper info. As you can see from the screenshot, the essence of Joe’s Goals is to increase your productivity by giving you points for the positive and negative ticks you give yourself. The more positive green ticks you have the higher the score, the more negative red ones, the lower. That’s really almost all there is too it, simple eh?

What makes it really powerful, despite the simplicity is that you can weight each task. A negative tick for “Laundry” (ie: you didn’t do it) will contribute with a -1 to your score, while doing the dishes contributes with a +2. You can play around with these settings, as you can see in the Wiki Guide, I recommend overweighting negative tasks to give you the extra impetus to do them.

Another great feature is the Logbook. This works in the same way as Goals, but instead of ticks, you can create log entries. I will be using this to document my projects, although not to manage them. Management and organization is done best in other apps, but for tracking this is a killer. It is a bit hard to search the log though, this did puzzle me since I thought that’s the point, but you can do it. If you create a Logbook report, you can just search with Firefox, or save the page and search later.

Tagging, advanced reports, unlimited Goals and Logbooks, archiving are all part of this truly original and very usable approach to productivity, I can heartily recommend it to anyone, I even donated the $12 for the year I liked it so much! I did donate on the wrong account though, the one with my test email, but never mind…What this got me though was the removal of the marginally annoying Google Ad at the top, and I also got to use the new 2.0 Joe’s Goals. I’ll keep you posted on the Wiki, and here on the blog, on how that’s going.

Take a look at Joe’s Goals
Read the Hack Your Day Wiki Guide on Joe’s Goals