According to Victor Frankl, the famous neurologist, psychologist and Holocaust survivor, goals are what give us purpose in life.
In his book Man’s Search For Meaning, Frankl discusses the significance of having a purpose that helps us strive towards a future.
What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling of some goal worthy of him.
He says that without setting meaningful goals for our future, our present won’t have any meaning either.
When I interviewed Benjamin Hardy, a psychologist who studies how we can achieve our goals, on an episode of my Deep Dive Podcast, he also added that goals also help create motivation.
He says that if you’re clear about the outcome you want and you’re explicit about it, you’ll be a lot more motivated to get to work.
Even James Clear – the ‘father of habits’ – says that, whilst our progress comes down to our processes, systems and habits. If you don’t have a goal in the first place, then you don’t have a direction to go in.
So having goals to work towards is clearly very important. There are countless tools out there that can help us work towards achieving them.
In this article, I’m going to run through the 15 Top Tools that I think are the best to help manage and achieve your goals. But first…
Very Quickly, How Do We Set Goals?
There are lots of different ways to set goals, but to keep things simple, we’re going to use Ray Dalio’s 5-Step method.
Ray is a famous billionaire and hedge fund manager. In his book, Principles: Life and Work, he uses the following goal-setting framework:
So, for each step in the framework, I’m going to be sharing a couple of digital and physical tools that can help you set, manage, and achieve your goals.
There will be 15 tools in total. I hope they’ll be to help you, whatever stage you’re at.
Tools to Set Clear and Audacious Goals
When it comes to setting your goals down on paper, I find that simplicity is key.
We want our goals to be easy to read, nicely organised, and quick to reach whenever we want to remind ourselves of what them. I’ve found that there is no better tool to use than Google Docs for this.
Tool 1 : Google Docs
By writing your goals into a blank Google Doc, your can bookmark the page to your web browser. So no matter where you’re working from, you can quickly pull them up and scan down the list.
To lay out my goal doc, I like to use what I call my 12-Month Celebration.
I imagine that in twelve month’s time I’ll be sitting down for dinner with all of my closest family and friends. One by one, we all take it in turns to celebrate our biggest achievements from the past year.
I ask myself: “What would I like to be celebrating?”. Then I start writing my answers in the Google Doc.
This question helps me follow Ray’s advice of keeping my goals clear. But I can still stay ambitious about what I want to achieve.
Then, at the start of each day, I look at my Google Doc. I ask myself what the next step towards each of my goals might be.
I use the answers to set what I call my daily highlight.
My daily highlight is the one thing that I want to achieve from the day ahead. The one thing that, if completed, would allow me to consider the day a success.
I then write my Daily Highlight onto The Ugmonk Analog ToDo List.
Tool 2 : The Ugmonk Analog ToDo List.
I’ve been using the Analog ToDo List for a number of years. I’ve found it to be a really aesthetic way to write down my daily goal.
The quality of the wooden card holder is brilliant. I can carry the little card in my pocket if I need to be away from the desk for the day.
It gives me a huge amount of pleasure to cross off my daily highlight at the end of each day. It’s something I’d highly recommend you try.
Tools to Acknowledge and Identify Potential Problems
Once we’ve set our goals, Ray’s next step is to identify and acknowledge the potential problems that could come up.
Spotting the problems that lay along our chosen route can be tough to do.
As an example, if I take the goal of becoming a Gymshark athlete, I can see that I’m going to need to:
- Go to the gym
- Watch my diet
- Get a bit more hench before they invite me onto the team.
But what I might not realise is that I don’t actually have the time to everything necessary to achieve my goal. This is here Tool 3 can help.
Tool 3 : Streaks on Apple Watch.
In this app, I can set the goal of hitting the gym 4 times a week.
Then, after a few days have passed, I can quickly see my progress towards my streak goal. I can see how many consecutive days I’ve exercised, which motivates me to continue on the streak.
Acting as a virtual accountability buddy, it will also notify me when we’re about to miss a streak. lt lets me know when I haven’t been to the gym in a little while.
Streaks a great tool to help flag when you’re not sticking to your goals. It highlights the possible problems in your routine.
Once we’ve realised we might be struggling to find time for our new goal, we might like to take things up a level by using time tracking software.
Tool 4 : Rize
Rise helps you automatically track all of your time so you can identify problems sooner.
When creating our goals, we have a tendency to overestimate how much we can actually get done in each day. Rise will let us see just how productive we’re being with our time and, most importantly, how much time we’re really dedicating towards each goal.
By using time-tracking software, you can quickly identify the goals that are slipping through the cracks. This will help you spot the projects that aren’t progressing as much as you’d like.
Tools to Diagnose the Root Cause of Problems
So, we’ve now identified the problems that could get in the way of us achieving our goals. Step 3 of Ray’s framework is now to take these problems and diagnose their root cause.
Let’s continue with my Gymshark athlete example. Once I’ve identified that I’m struggling to hit the gym enough times in a week, I need to now investigate the reason why.
To do this, I love to use a method called The 5 Whys, which is where Tool 5 comes in handy.
Tool 5: Day One
Day one is a journalling app that I’ve been using for around 10 years. I mainly use it on my Mac, but it syncs across all of my devices. I can make a quick entry on my iPad or iPhone whenever I’m away from my desk.
When I’m in Day One, I like to ask myself The 5 Whys to try and get to the root cause of my problem.
It might look a little bit like this:
- Why am I not working out consistently? Answer: “Because I don’t schedule it into my calendar”
- Why don’t I schedule it? Answer: “Because even when I do, I won’t feel like doing it so I skip it”
- Why do I skip it? Answer: “Because I’ve made it optional in my head”
- Why is it optional? Answer: “Because I can always think of something more urgent to do than go to the gym”
- Why are other things more urgent? Answer: “I don’t value the goal of becoming a Gymshark athlete as highly as my other goals.”
Clearly my goal of becoming a Gymshark athlete just isn’t that important to me – at least not compared to my other ambitions. So if you’re really not making progress, it might be time to return to the drawing board and find a goal that truly matters. To do this, try Tool 6.
Tool 6: Journal & Pen
Tool number 6 is the trusty old Journal & Pen.
When it comes to brainstorming and journalling our thoughts, writing things down in a physical notebook just feels great.
I personally like to use Leuchtturm1917 journals, but any quality journal that feels nice in your hands will work well.
There’s something about the act of writing that slows your brain down. It helps you think clearly and brings a level of clarity to your ideas.
Tool 7: Notability
But, in the times where I don’t have my notebook with me, I’ll use Notability to make handwritten notes on my iPad.
I absolutely love Notability and much prefer it to the Goodnotes app, the notes page that comes pre-loaded on some devices.
The writing feels so lifelike and its a great replacement for my physical journal.
I still get all the benefits from exploring my ideas with the added benefit of being able to store my notes digitally and sync them across my devices.
Tools to Design Solutions
Once we’ve investigated the root cause of our problems, step 4 is to design solutions.
When it comes to designing effective solutions, James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits that we should focus on implementing systems. These are the processes, strategies, and plans you can use on a daily basis to actually get stuff done.
Where goals determine our direction, the systems determine our success.
When it comes to designing system solutions, I like to use Tool 8: Notion.
Tool 8: Notion
If you haven’t heard me talk about Notion already, it’s my go-to workspace for all of my project and task management systems.
Whether it’s my content systems, my business systems, or just my day-to-day life systems, I do everything in Notion. It helps me keep track of my YouTube videos, write my weekly newsletter LifeNotes, and organise my day.
So, what do these systems look like?
In notion, we can map out the exact problem we are trying to solve and use the different in-built tools to help design our solution.
If our goal is to produce one YouTube video a week, one solution could be to design a content system. It could include a database of content ideas which then breaks out into actionable steps with timelines and deadlines.
By creating a system that is standardised and repeatable, we can reuse our solution over and over again. This way, we can make consistent progress towards our goal.
But, you might have a problem that you just can’t think of a solution to.
Even the best workspace tool is useless if you don’t have the right ideas to put into it.
Sometimes we’re going to need a bit of a helping hand. This is where Tools 9 & 10 are going to come in handy.
Tool 9: Skillshare
Whatever problem we’re facing, you can almost guarantee someone else has faced before. And thanks with Skillshare, you can learn directly from the person with the solution.
Skillshare is an online course platform where you can learn all sorts of new skills. Whether it’s building a website, learning to code, or even learning how to play a bit of Ed Sheeran on the guitar, it has the answers.
It’s a great place to learn from people who have lived through a similar experience to the one you’re going through. They probably had a very similar goal themselves a few years ago.
Tool 10: Shortform
Along with Skillshare we also have Shortform.
Shortform is a brilliant service that quickly summarises the main learning points from thousands of popular non-fiction books.
If signing up for an online course feels like a bit of a step too far, there are hundreds of books out there that might help you solve your problem.
Whatever the problem you’re facing, someone has probably already written a book on how to solve it. You can even find my book, Feel-Good Productivity, on there 😜.
Tools to Execute Your Plan
Finally, in step 5, it’s time to put your solution into action and execute on your plan.
By this point, we should have a good idea of what we need to do to achieve our goal. We just need to go ahead and do the thing.
But more often than not, doing the thing isn’t as easy as it seems. We can find ourselves getting distracted, lacking motivation, or simply struggling to get it done.
To help improve the effectiveness of our execution, tools 11-15 will help us get things done.
Tool 11: Forest
When you sit down to do the thing, it’s normal to struggle to maintain focus throughout the day. This is because our focus will ebb and flow as our energy changes.
After some time, you’ll find yourself starting to feel a little bored. You might want to check your phone or step away from your desk.
It’s important to take breaks. But to make sure we’re being intentional with our rest, we can use a Pomodoro timer such as Forest to help.
Forest works by planting a virtual tree when we sit down to work.
The longer we work, the bigger our tree grows. But as soon as we go to use our phone, if the tree isn’t fully grown, it will die.
Each tree takes 30 minutes to grow. This encourages us to maintain focus for half an hour, a full hour or even 90 minutes. It also puts distracting apps out of sight.
Our phones can be one of our biggest distractions. Even with Forest, we might find that we’re unable to resist the tempting ‘ding’ of a notification – pulling us away from doing the thing.
This is where Tool 12: Opal can help. It removes all of our mobile distractions, so we’re no longer tempted to check our phones.
Tool 12: Opal
Opal works by completely blocking certain apps from our use.
By turning on Opal, you’ll no longer receive distracting notifications. Even if you’re tempted to quickly scroll Twitter, you won’t be able to open the app.
I’ve found it to be a really effective way to remove all of my online distractions.
Once we’re distraction-free and working to our Pomodoro rhythm, another way we can boost our energy and improve our execution is to add some fun.
We can take advantage of all the Feel-Good hormones that are released from having fun. This makes our work more effective and helps us enjoy the process along the way.
Tool 13: Background Music
I’ve found the simplest way to add an element of fun to almost any task is to turn on background music.
By playing the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack or some dramatic Hogwarts music, I get a huge boost to my motivation and enjoyment.
But, even with all these tools, sometimes we might still struggle to get started. Rather than getting frustrated or upset, I’ve found that the next tool might just do the trick.
Tool 14: Sand timer
If you find yourself struggling to get going, turning over a 5-minute timer. Promising yourself that you’ll do just 5 minutes of work. This might be the last little nudge that you need.
By committing to just 5 minutes, we can trick our brain into beating procrastination. 5 minutes is easy to do, and it’ll be over before we know it.
But what usually happens with this sneaky trick is that by the time 5 minutes is up, you’ve completely forgotten about the deal you’ve made with yourself. You end up working for much longer.
You probably won’t even notice the sand timer run out as you enter a state of flow. This is because the hard part was getting going.
Once we’ve started, it’s much easier to just keep on doing it.
Tool 15: Finding a community
Our final tool to help with our execution is finding a community – a group of like-minded people to work with.
Even if you’re a solopreneur or freelancer, studies have shown that working around similar people who are facing similar problems can boost your own performance.
This is because we can take advantage of the energising impact of people when we work. Whether we’re helping others, being helped, or simply watching other people succeed, being around other people has a significant impact on our productivity.
This is why we’ve set up our very own online community for creators and entrepreneurs. It’s called ProductivityLab.com.
Achieving your goals isn’t easy, but it’s totally worth the work. But hopefully these tools might make that work a little bit easier. Which are you most excited to try?
if you’re on the hunt for even more tools to help you achieve your goals, then I recommend checking out Spark 2025. It’s an online summit I’ll be running between the 4th-5th January 2025, designed to help you build your own sustainable productivity systems to get stuff done. We’ll have talks from experts, interactive workshops, and much more. You can reserve your free spot here.
