So you have gone through the personal goal setting process and know what you want in life. Now what? How do you actually achieve your goals? Modern technology comes to the rescue. Read on for the best apps to help you achieve goals.
Focality: Goal Setting, Planning and Reflection
First, the core of the goal setting process. You need an app to define your goals, plan how to achieve them and reflect on your progress.
Focality is an app to help you achieve your goals by employing a method called deep planning. Instead of creating sequential plans (first this, then that) which quickly get out of date, you plan your achievements in time hierarchies. What do you want to achieve this year? This month? This week? Today? Each of these plans is segmented by your goals so that it is easy to balance multiple goals. At the end of each year/month/week/day, you look back. What went well? What not? What can I change? Focality compiles these reflections and additional data so that you can easily gain insights into your behavior and how to improve yourself.
Habit Tracking Apps
Another class of apps to help you achieve your goals are habit trackers. These apps focus on establishing and tracking habits. If you are working on ambitious goals (as you should), it is extremely important to establish productive habits and get rid of bad habits. These apps can help.
Learning with Spaced Repetition
Pursuing goals is not just about the outcome. Ambitious goals frequently inspire you to expand your knowledge and skill set. You will learn new methods, new processes, new strategies. You will gain detailed knowledge about your chosen domain and the tactics to help you achieve your goals. These learnings will empower you long after you have achieved the original goal.
There are helpful apps to maximize the gain during this process. Knowledge quickly fades over time unless we access it constantly. Outside of school/university we often don’t do this consciously. We learn a lot – and we forget a lot. Spaced repetition apps enable you to commit new knowledge to long term memory with minimum effort.
The process is simple: Write down what you want to remember in a “flashcard format”. A question and an answer. Then try to recall the answer. A smart algorithm will calculate when it is a good time to recall each piece of information. If you successfully remember it, the next repetition will be farther into the future than before. This strategy is both more effective – since cramming knowledge repeatedly in a short time frame doesn’t actually work too well – and time-saving.
Use one of these apps to cement your knowledge:
Time Tracking
Successful time management requires you to have a good idea of how long you will take to complete tasks. Many people struggle with this. To improve your estimation skills, it is tremendously helpful to compare your estimation against the actual time it took you to complete a task. It is easy to trip up at that point though. Unless you write down the time you spent on each task, the only way to know how long you took is again an estimation. So you end up comparing a poor estimation against another estimation which is possibly (probably) also poor. That’s not effective.
Time tracking apps help you to achieve goals by enabling you to know how long a task took precisely. Here are a few good ones:
Meditation Apps
Meditation is a technique to train attention and awareness. You can use it to help you achieve goals by improving focus, cope with stress and improve sleep – among other benefits.
The most famous meditation style is unguided meditation. Think about the monk that silently sits on the floor, legs crossed, and listens to the sound of the wind. Its counter-part, guided meditation, has gained a lot of popularity over recent years and is especially suited for beginners. As the name implies, you are guided through the process, usually by a friendly calm voice. Use the following apps to help you achieve goals through meditation:
More help to achieve your goals
Goal setting has many aspects, helpful apps being just one of them. If you want to learn more about how to achieve goals, browse through all goal setting articles on this site.
This article is also available in German: Die besten Apps um Deine Ziele zu erreichen