It’s that time of year again for new years resolutions. The trick to accomplishing your resolutions is this:

If You Measure it, it will improve.

Having an easy to use system for recording progress on your goals is essential. Here is a post on some iPhone apps for keeping goals. And here is another post on online tools for keeping goals.

Here are some recommendations of tools I have used for measuring my goals:

• For reading books I use Goodreads. In 2009 I read 18 books. Still shy of my goal of reading 2 a month.
• For running I use Nike Plus. I ran 205.27 miles in 2009. If you don’t want to buy the Nike Plus and have an iPhone, RunKeeper is a pretty sweet alternative.
• Mint.com is a popular way for measuring your finances.

This year I want to remember to send birthday cards to all of my family. I’m setting up reminders in NotifyMe 4 days before each birthday for the whole year.
I’m using Evernote to keep track of ideas I get for writing more posts, songs, film ideas, business ideas and fun things to do to achieve my goals of: building my personal brand, being in a touring punk band, making an indi film, starting my own business and making memories with my family. I really like the tagging feature in Evernote that lets me tag any ideas I get for easy filing.

Another goal of mine is to exercise more and lift weights. I haven’t found a good way to track lifting other than keeping track with paper and pencil since I don’t want to  carry my iPhone in the gym. I have a spreadsheet that I record how much weight and how many reps that I carry with me in the gym instead. This way I never forget how much weight I did the last time and I can push myself when I start to see myself plateauing. I will be using a calorie counting app called DailyBurn on the iPhone to track how many calories I’m getting. We’ll see how it goes.