Keeping Daily Goals with Lift.do

11 Dec 2013

History

As many of you know, I’ve recently started working as a Front-End Web Dev for Dave Ramsey’s (@daveramsey) Internet Development Team (@devwithpurpose). Previously I had started my own company and was working way too many hours.

So, with this job change I wanted to implement some dramatic life changes to help better my life… spiritually, physically, and mentally. A good friend of mine, Doug Neiner (@dougneiner) encouraged me to use a neat program called Lift.do to assist me in my transformation.

Transformation

As part of this transformation I decided that I wanted to become a morning person and start waking up at 5:00am. This was a grandiose goal since I’ve pretty much been a night-owl for most of my life, but I thought it was important change.

My high-level goals for the transformation were to…

• To change the impact that I had on my family in the evenings
• To start fresh and invest on things that matter
• To be available when my family started to wake up
• To time-box my efforts

The trick about waking up early is to not wake up your spouse! My wife is a light sleeper and once she wakes up it is hard for her to go back to sleep. So, I decided to purchase a Fitbit Force to wake me up silently, unfortunately it has been on pre-order for months until just now. In the meantime I’ve been using the Silent Vibrating Personal Alarm Clock “Shake-N-Wake” which is huge and bulky, but has enabled my wife to continue sleeping until I receive the Fitbit.

Lift.do

Lift.do has enabled me to pick whatever goals or plans that I want to achieve and encourages me meet them on a daily basis. I primarily use the iPhone application, but there is also an Android application, and a web application.

Habits

You first go through and pick all your daily goals or plans that you want to accomplish.

It took a while for me to find existing goals or thing of unique ones just for me, but once I did I’ve settled on a set of about 20 items.

When you go to find new items you can choose from a wide range of categories and browser most popular plans. It’s fun to be part of some popular ones for the social aspect that I’ll touch on later.

But for the most part, this is the screen that I primarily interact with on a daily basis. I’m basically gamifying my productivity because it keeps track of how many days I’ve done a certain activity and if I’m on a consecutive streak, etc…

Activity

The social aspect comes into play when you actually check off one of the items for the day. In addition you can add a note to your item to give more context as to what you did exactly. From that point you can then see the activity of everyone else who has subscribed to that goal and can give them props or add a comment to their entry.

You can also give props and add comments on the activity tab which lists the progress of your friends. I am usually more included to give props or add a comment when the author as provided additional notes to their entry.

When you are working on goals and trying to develop good habits, then every little bit of encourage can help ;)

Me

And for you statistics nerds there is a nice dashboard listing all of your goals and graphs of how many times you’ve completed each one across a range of weeks.

You can also drill into each of these goals to get more fine-grained details of frequency per month, a calendar overview, highlighting longest day streak, etc…

I don’t often visit this screen, but it’s nice to know it exists for when I’m getting curious about my progression and how I’m doing at a high-level. Visually it’s easy to tell what areas I’m excelling at and which areas I need more effort. As you can see, I’m not so good at taking the trash out every night, but I did tonight! ;)

Conclusion

If you are anything like me, then you need all the help you can get to do the things that you know you should be doing. Lift.do has really helped me over the last 2 months or so to do a lot of things that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Feel free to connect to my Lift.do Profile if you like. I hope you find this program as helpful and fun as I do.