42goals – Cute Little Tool to Finally Quit Smoking, Drinking Coffee and Take Vitamins Daily

As the name of the new startup suggests, 42goals is all about goals: no matter how many personal goals you have, the startup offers a nice web interface that will sure help you get things done – provided that you are truly serious about your goals and about visiting the web application as well. It is not yet another to-do app – we have plenty of them already – but instead a tool to define specific goals for yourself and track your performance.

Suppose you want to drink only one cup of coffee per day (and you currently drink at least three), run 2 miles per day and finally learn to spend under $20 on your daily expenses that you don’t have any idea about their true purpose at all. After all, everyone has some goals – but most of us just keep such goals in the backgrounds of our minds without really paying attention to them or achieving any significant results. This is exactly where 42goals comes into play: it lets you establish your own goals and track your successes – all the while motivating you to keep improving your results until all the goals are achieved.

42goals offers a straightforward visual interface for you to create your goals and quickly evaluate your progress on each specific goal. At that every goal may have a measurement of its own: you can either measure the goal in pieces or numbers (cups of coffee or miles of running) or you can simply track yes or no behavior for some other goals (if you watered flowers or read those 2 chapters from the boring book you cannot master at all).

The website offers templates for the most frequent goals though you can easily create goals of your own – and add icons that will help you easily see how proud of yourself you can be. After you track your behavior for a while, you will be able to review your results using various graphical charts available to see how well (or poor) you actually cope with your goals.

Another similar tool that you probably know of is Joe’s Goals but the distinct advantage of 42goals is that measurements for goals may vary here so you don’t have to only check or uncheck things that you have accomplished or failed but can actually track your success with multiple numbers that will measure your performance.

The new tool is brought to you by a Russian team that seems to care about motivation a lot as they have already launched another tool named Worktrek that is also intended to track your performance – but this one was mostly intended for professional performance aspects.

The main problem with the tool as I now see it is that it is desktop-only while to me it would have been more logical to be able to add cups of coffee right when I drink them in a café on an iPhone or Android phone instead of learning a new habit of having to sit every evening behind my computer and trying to remember how I behaved during the day from the perspective of my goals.

But the developers promise that they only launch the tool in the very basic state for now to be able to further develop it – and mobile versions and Twitter integration are all in the near-future plans. But anyway if you are serious enough about your goals, spending a few minutes a day on the application to update your performance is definitely worth the trouble given that any factor that motivates you into achieving the desired results definitely deserves attention.