Personal Goal-setting Tools

Whether you want to lose weight, learn a foreign language, give one sincere compliment a day or do something outside your comfort zone, personal goals have the power to enrich and change your life -- as long as you fulfill them. Goal-setting tools help you set detailed personal goals, which can go a long way toward achieving them.

Journal

Use a journal to write down and track your personal goals. The more detailed you make your goals, the easier it is to progress toward achieving them. You might write all of your ultimate goals in a master list, and use separate pages to detail each goal. Write down the purpose or motivation behind each goal, the behaviors you'll need to adapt or change, and the resources you have or need. Break each goal down into steps, or smaller goals, that you can achieve in short periods of time.

Index Cards

Index cards or Post-it notes help you stay on track with the smaller goals that contribute to the success of a larger personal goal. If you use a journal to detail five-year, three-year, one-year and monthly goals, you can write your daily and weekly contributing goals on index cards or sticky notes. If your goal is to take a monthlong trip to Japan next year, contributing goals may include saving money, getting a passport, reading travel books and learning some basic Japanese phrases.

Calendar

A wall calendar or a personal organizer can either take the place of a journal and index card system, or augment it. Either way, putting your ultimate personal goal and its building block goals on the calendar is one way to help you stay accountable. If you have a tendency to sometimes put off certain critical aspects of your goal -- such as daily workouts when your goal is to increase your fitness -- a calendar can help you keep an eye on your behavior so you can adjust it and get back on track.

Software

If the idea of tracking the minute specifics of your personal goals with pen and paper seems old-school to you, you can use goal-setting software to help you set and manage your goals. Many goal-setting computer programs ask you specific questions to guide you as you set your main and component goals. Most software allows you to then track yourself by inputting data -- whether it’s how many miles you ran or how much money you saved -- which is reflected in graphs or charts.

Life Coach

Setting personal goals may seem like an overwhelming prospect, once you consider all the areas of your life you may wish to improve. A life coach can help you hone in on the personal goals you should tackle first, and assist you in coming up with SMART goals, or specific, measurable, action-based, realistic and time-constrained goals. A life coach can also walk you through the steps of detailing your goals, and give you tips on how to avoid losing sight of long-term goals from day to day.