Today I’m announcing my first iPhone app, Goal Meter, which is an intuitive way to track multiple goals and get motivated to reach them. I’ll explain why it works so well and how you can use this technique even if you don’t have an iPhone.

Basically, you choose a goal that can be represented with numbers, such as taking lessons, earning money, losing weight, or writing articles. A progress bar grows and changes color as you get closer to your goal, providing a visual and spatial way to track your goals.

I did not design Goal Meter to compete with all of the other personal development apps already available. I had the idea years ago and only recently decided to bring it to the iPhone (which was an interesting journey by itself). When I finished the app, I took a look at the competition and was pleasantly surprised to find that no one else had followed my approach to goal tracking.

Most of the other goal tracking apps are too complex. It takes dozens of steps just to register some progress toward a goal. You have to wade through due dates, to do style checkboxes, and other fluff. Many of them also confuse goals with habits. You might want to establish the habit of taking a vitamin every day, so the way too complicated goal trackers handle it with weekly calendars and flags if you’ve missed a day and alerts and reminders. Yuck. Goal Meter is effective because it gets to the essence of goal tracking.

Setting up Goal Meter is easy. You enter a name for your goal, then select a number that represents the end point of your journey. It could be $10,000 earned, 50 articles written, or 1,000 hours of practice at a skill you’re acquiring. Then you choose where to start from (usually zero), where you happen to be now (also usually zero), and the increment amount, which is basically just the amount of hours / dollars / whatever you’ll add to your goal each time you make progress. You might want to track income in increments of $500 while tracking the number of lessons you’ve had with an increment of one. That’s all there is to setting it up.

You start out with a black screen with two big plus and minus buttons on it. Every time you make progress toward your goal, you hit the plus button. Goal Meter adds the amount you chose, slowly building a progress bar from the bottom to the top of the screen (that’s the meter part). You start out with a blank screen, and by the time you reach your goal, the progress bar fills the entire screen. Additionally, the color of the bar transitions from red to orange to yellow to green as it grows. You can really visualize the progress you’re making.

I came up with the idea when I was first learning to play hockey. I read that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill but only 1,000 hours to achieve competence. I was inspired to learn to skate and play hockey, and I had a strong vision of where I wanted to be in 1,000 hours. The trouble is, that’s a long time in the future. Ice time is expensive, and I can only physically handle so many practice sessions in a week or a month.

While I was comfortable setting this long term goal, there were many times, especially in the beginning, when I became frustrated with my seeming lack of progress. I knew where I started from, I knew where I wanted to be, and I knew I was putting the time in — so why did I feel like I wasn’t making any progress? Those thoughts can be very demotivating.

So I did the most sensible thing I could think of. I drew a grid of 1,024 squares (because it made a perfect square and was close enough to 1,000). Each square represented one hour of practicing or playing hockey. Every time I spent an hour working toward my goal, I colored in a square. I didn’t track dates. I didn’t track my time in minute, highly accurate numbers — I hate record keeping as it is. But I could handle coloring in a square now and then.

The squares slowly added up. As colored spots marched across the page, I could see how much progress I was really making — and more importantly, I could just see that I was making progress. My progress chart became a real source of motivation for me. Even when I had a day where I felt I made no progress on the ice — or even regressed — I knew that back in my office there would be some kind of result or reward for all my work. Knowing that I would color in one of those squares kept me focused on the purpose of each individual practice session — long term growth. The frustration I used to feel completely disappeared.

I had such fantastic results with this goal tracking idea that I knew it deserved to become software. The iPhone is the ideal platform for such an application. Although I had never written anything more complex than a few Javascripts now and then, I plunged into Objective-C and wrote this little app over the course of about five days. That might sound like a lot to my readers who do program, but remember that I was a total beginner.

I am especially proud of the fit and finish I put into the app. For such a simple app, I had to attend to a surprising amount of detail to bring it up to my standards. It was worth it, because dozens of people downloaded Goal Meter when it entered the app store, and in that short time I received many positive comments.

Goal Meter tracks multiple goals in a straightforward and appealing way. You don’t have to track hockey practice with it. You could track piano practice, French lessons, money earned, articles written — almost anything. You can also track negative goals, which means weight loss. Suppose you want to start at 150 pounds and end at 130 pounds. Goal Meter will detect that you’re tracking a negative goal and reverse the display logic appropriately. So when you lose a pound and hit the minus button, the progress bar will grow instead of shrink, since losing actually means gaining in that case.

As simple as it is, I use Goal Meter every day. I’m tracking every important goal in my life right now. At a quick glance, I can see where I stand on all of the things that matter to me.

I invite you to check out Goal Meter on the App Store. It’s the best goal tracking app out there!

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