Do you find yourself forgetting to do tasks that needs to be done? Do you ask yourself “how can I remember to do the tasks I forget”? I used to pride myself on my memory, but not so much anymore. When trying to keep up with work, the house, the schedules of two teenage kids, and their homework, I find it more difficult to remember to do some of the other important things. Yeah, there’s the getting older thing too, but we won’t discuss that!
The tasks I find myself most likely to forget are the ones I don’t need to do everyday. Two things I seem to have the hardest time remembering are changing the air filter on the A/C unit and giving my dog his monthly heart worm medicine. I think we can agree, these are things I should not forget. This is where Goalposts comes in. Now that I have a goal set for each of these, with an alert to remind me when it’s time to do these tasks, I never have to remember!
Setting up goals in Goalposts to help you remember your tasks is simple. By now you are probably familiar with setting up new goals, so I won’t go into the tiny details. I will be using my “Change Filter” goal as the example.
Tap the “+” on your wheel to add a new goal and give your goal an identity.- Under Description, tap “time” and then “+” to add a new unit. Just backspace and type what you want your unit to be called. I have cleverly called mine Filter.
- Tap “daily” and set the period to how often you want to do this goal. For my goal it would be monthly.
- Under Tracking it’s completely up to you whether you want it to total entries.
- Extras is a VERY important step to setting up this type of goal. This is where you are going to set Goalposts to remind you. Tap “Add new extra” tap “Alert”. Here you can tell it to alert you when there is no activity for a certain amount of time. Tap “save” at the top right and this will take you back to the New Goal screen where you can tap “save” at the top right again to save the goal.
Note: For my “Change Filter” goal, I have three alerts set. I do this because there is a very good chance that when it alerts me the first time, I will not be able to change the filter right then. I have an alert to remind me when there has been no activity for at least 31, 35, and 40 days. Surely by the third alert I will find time to change it! If you would like to add multiple alerts to your goals, just follow step 5 and after you set your first “alert” and tap save, tap “Add new extra” again. You can set as many alerts as you like.
Now whenever I change my air filter I just tap on the wheel, tap my air filter icon, tap record and forget about it! When it’s been 31 days, Goalposts will remind me it’s time to change the filter again. You will also notice, like the weight tracking goal, your entry will show as a post and not a banner. Only time tracking goals show as banners.
Final thought while writing this post: As I stare at the wall waiting for the right words to come to me, my eyes land on the smoke detector. I should really enter a goal to change those batteries twice a year!