If you don’t know where you’re going, you will probably end up somewhere else.
Laurence J. Peter’s quote from 1969 still stands today and highlights the importance of setting and following through on goals.
However, in 1969, setting and tracking goals required not much more than a piece of paper and determination. Nowadays, there are countless apps, schedulers, project management tools, spreadsheets, and all types of modern devices for tracking goals.
Today, we’ll show you some of the very best apps you can find online for tracking your goals, whether they’re related to your personal or business life.
Timely
The best apps are those where you don’t have to struggle to adopt and use them every day. With Timely, you can not only track your time without being interrupted, but you can also track your goals and tasks within our app.
The philosophy we have is that even the biggest goal won’t seem all that huge once it’s broken down into smaller, bite-sized tasks. This is what you can do in the task list view in Timely, and create individual tasks for yourself or the rest of your team.
The task view is a superb way to break down what you have to do and stack it up against your week or month. And the best part is you can track your time in Timely and add it to each task that you have set for yourself.
That means that you get to see progress on your tasks in real-time, motivating you to push harder to reach your goals. And what’s even cooler is that Timely is completely surveillance free. There are no screenshots, screen recordings, activity monitoring or anything else your employees won’t appreciate.
Timely works just as well for personal as it does for your business goals. And the best part is, you can try it out for free without any commitment first. Paid plans start at $9 per user per month.
Strides
Whether you’re looking to crush your fitness goals and need an app to hold you accountable, or you’re a solopreneur trying to keep everything in one place, Strides is a great way to set and track your goals.
The app is set up to track four different types of goals:
- Habits (e.g. quitting smoking, drinking enough water every day)
- Targets (e.g. completing a certain number of orders)
- Averages (e.g. maintaining a certain number of steps walked on a weekly/monthly basis)
- Projects (completing larger tasks in smaller increments)
If you’ve never set any goals on your own, Strides can help you do that with their simple 3-step process. You can get daily or weekly reports and show charts with your progress to get you motivated on the way to crushing those goals.
You can use Strides for one major goal that you have set out for yourself or tailor the app so that it contains your entire daily schedule. You’ll get daily updates on your progress through the phone app, so you don’t lose sight of your goals.
As for the downsides, the app is only available on iOs devices, which means no Android and no browser-based apps are available. The app is free to download and use, and there is an in-app purchase of $4.99 per month to unlock premium features such as progress reports.
Trello
If you’ve never used an app for tracking goals at work, you might want to start with Trello. The reason is simple - it’s the most intuitive out of all the project management apps, and you can get started in minutes, even if you’ve never used something like this before.
Trello functions as a Kanban board where you add different columns (e.g., for stages in completing a certain goal) and cards within those columns. Usually, cards represent smaller tasks, but you can go beyond that and create larger tasks with checklists under one card.
You can then tick off those items, and the progress bar for each card moves along. It’s also possible to format the cards with different tag colors, images, and more.
You may think that the best thing about Trello is how customizable it is. We’d argue that the best thing about this app is the value that you can get out of the free version, as there are very few limitations. Paid plans start at $5 per user per month.
ClickUp
If you love your project management apps, but Trello seems way too simple for your taste, then ClickUp might be a great fit. It can be used both for work, and your personal goals, and the level of detail and customization you can do is truly endless.
Goals are the highest in the hierarchy in ClickUp, and you can set high-level goals and accompany them with Targets. Targets are specific KPIs that you can work towards, e.g., writing a certain number of words/articles monthly in my case.
You can create goal scorecards and store your individual goals, discerning between different goal types or business/personal goals. Moreover, you can track your progress weekly and get a visual representation of what you’re doing (or not).
This barely scratches the surface of ClickUp’s capabilities, as it’s a versatile tool that can be used by teams as large as hundreds of people. Having said that, it might be a bit too complex for a single person who wants to stay on top of their goals.
You can try it out for free, though, and see for yourself. You’ll get 100MB of storage and unlimited tasks, which is a great starting point. Paid plans start at $5 per user per month.
Weekdone
And now for something a bit different. Weekdone is not your typical project management software - it’s an OKR platform where you can set quarterly objectives and get weekly updates on your progress. Needless to say, it’s more for a business use case rather than a personal one.
The main unit of measurement in Weekdone is the OKR - these are the mammoth goals you set for a quarter. Based on them, you can set monthly and weekly goals within the app to get you closer to the OKRs in incremental steps.
Once the plan is laid out, you can view it hierarchically in Weekdone, so you get a bird’s eye view of things as they unfold.
You can use the app completely free if you have up to 3 people in your team. The pricing structure is a bit unusual, so the cheapest you can pay is $90 per month, which gets you access to all the features for a team of 4-10 people.
Way of Life
Judging by the very name of the app, you can tell that Way of Life is meant for individuals looking to set and achieve their personal goals. Similarly to Strides, it’s available on mobile devices (iOs and Android), and it’s a lightweight, easy-to-use tool for personal goal management.
Within Way of Life, it’s more about achieving bigger goals through everyday habits, and that’s what the app is really about. You set daily habits for yourself and use the app to remind you to stay on track, as well as show you visual cues of your progress.
The user experience is definitely the app’s strong side, as you can choose from a variety of color-coded themes in their system to display progress. You can even add your notes to a personal diary in the app.
The app is completely free to download and use. However, there are in-app purchases of $4.99 per month to buy the premium version.
Habitica
If you don’t want to feel like setting and working towards goals is dragging you down, perhaps you just need a different way of doing things. Instead of task lists and progress bars, Habitica lets you do goal setting in the form of a game.
It’s pretty straightforward - you set good and bad habits, and they’re attributed to minuses and pluses. Each time you do something good, you get a +, and you’re rewarded, e.g., eating a healthy meal. Do something negative (such as getting an alcoholic drink), and you get a minus.
That reflects on your character in Habitica and how they feel. The more tasks you tick off, the better health your characters have. There’s also a chance you can get special items in the game that will make your journey even easier.
You can try the app for free, and paid options start at $5 per month.
GoalsOnTrack
Prepare to set your goals high because GoalsOnTrack calls itself the goal software for high achievers. It does this by taking larger goals and breaking them up into smaller, more manageable chunks. Of course, the weight of goal setting is on you.
At the very start, you create larger goals, and thanks to the app’s forms, you can make sure that they are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). From that point, it’s easy to figure out how to create subtasks for your larger goals.
You don’t have to rack your brains because you can create goals from a template if you get stuck. Within the dashboard, you can manage your tasks and even track your time and make journal entries as you go.
Overall, it’s a mixed bag of things, and it’s much better suited to personal rather than business use.
You can try the app for free, and if you want to continue using it, there’s only the annual plan available. It costs $68 per year, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not happy.
Conclusion
Setting and tracking goals don’t have to be a chore. Whether you want to do it for yourself or as a part of your work routine, there are apps that let you cut out the noise and focus on the work. Today, we’ve shown you some of the very best, depending on your needs and use case.
Speaking of which, tracking your time is an amazing way to ensure you’re doing everything to meet and exceed your goals. Start tracking your time with Timely today, and you’ll see just how much you’re doing to meet your goals every day.
