Making the most out of Lifelog: Goals

I realised I don’t do a good enough job of storytelling some of the ways to make the most out of Lifelog’s features. So here’s a post about how to best use the Goals feature.

What are goals in Lifelog’s context?

In a way, goals here are like collections/categories for your posts. Except that these are the goals you have in your life. It could be lofty, ambitious ones, like your dreams, your aspirations, a personal moonshots. Or it could a tactical one, a S.M.A.R.T. goal, tightly defined to be achieved within a timebox.

How to get started on adding a goal

Before you even start writing, set a goal in the top right using the “Add goal” button.

1. Give your goal a short, punchy title. We limit the title so that it displays properly on the home page feed.
2. Next, give it a goal description, of what success looks like for your goal. Optionally, list out the major steps/milestones to better track progress. If it included a habit system, plan it out here.
3. Once you have saved your goals/habit systems here, you can then tag your daily posts with the goals.
4. Once the goal page is up, you can edit the title and description, as well as toggle the status: Ongoing, completed, or archived. Archived just means you have dropped it or no longer pursuing it.

How to use goals in your daily writing

I tend to use my list of goals these few ways in my daily writing:

• Use it as a writing prompt. If I’m not sure what to write for the day, I look through my goals list, and think through about my progress for each.
• If I’m just getting started on the goal, I’ll usually write about why I’m pursuing the goal. Then a plan of action.
• If I’m stuck on one of the goals. I can then write about what I’m stuck at, a a way to write to think.
• I can write progress updates to celebrate each goal - tiny wins, major milestones, important lessons learned. Your first customer, first dollar earned on the internet, you first hater. All goes here.
• Write about your readings and learnings under each goal. Say for my sleep biohacking goal, I do share about interesting articles I read, breakthrough research worth sharing.

Goals are core to Lifelog

This is why Lifelog isn’t just a daily writing platform. Yes, writing is the main activity we do here, but writing can be done for many reasons. Some do it to build an audience. Some for therapy. Here in Lifelog, we do it to gain clarity on our goals. We write to celebrate wins. We use words as records of our progress, not numbers. We leverage on the posts as a way to build and learn in public. By writing publicly in a community, we’re seeking support, or inviting discussion from others.

Best of all, writing is a great way of manifesting your goals. It’s a vital first step of translating that abstract, intangible idea into something more tangible and concrete. When it’s formed into words, you can poke at it, measure it, refine it.

Words are the seedlings of your real life goals. And through daily writing, we water them to give them the right conditions to grow and become something truly beautiful.