Keep New Year’s Resolutions with Spreadsheets

new-year-hatWhat are your new year’s resolutions? As in most cases, coming up with the goals is easy…but achieving them is another story! According to a Forbes article published a couple of years ago, only 8% of Americans achieve their resolutions. How can we keep our resolutions? Can we be better at goal-setting? As an organizational and prioritization tool, spreadsheets can keep us accountable and help us reach our goals. In our busy lives, it can be a challenge to keep track of and prioritize everything we set out to do. Spreadsheets can help by making us better managers of our lives.

While we can use spreadsheets from our computer or laptop such as through Microsoft Excel, it would be even more convenient if we can access them anytime, anywhere – literally at any moment’s whim. Google Sheets allow us to do just that! Accessible from any mobile device such as our phones, we can access Google Sheets anywhere. The easy accessibility is a useful feature, helping to remind us of deadlines or our goals, and allowing us to easily update data.

Looking for a step-by-step, how-to guide in how to set up a tracker using the Google Sheet app on your mobile phone? This post does just that! Track New Year’s Resolutions on Mobile Sheets

Spreadsheets offer two powerful features, among many: sorting and filtering. For instance, which of your tasks has the nearest deadline or which goals are of higher priority? This is where sorting proves useful, as you can sort the deadlines by most recent to latest, or your goals by level of importance. In addition, through date functions and the conditional formatting feature, spreadsheets can notify us when we are approaching specific deadlines. For instance, once the formulas are set up, our spreadsheet tool automatically informs us with a bright red “Y” warning when our task is past due.

After we master the fundamentals of this spreadsheet tool, we can tweak it to match our preferences. Want to set an alert 3 days prior to a due date? Interested in adding other categories? Once we master these basics, we can easily make these changes!

So, let’s dive in and figure out how to build this tool! Creating this tool involves understanding and applying date functions, nested IF function, conditional formatting, and the filter tool. For each of these, we offer video tutorials, which you can find in the orange box below:

Find all videos at Browse All or Youtube channel

For a 3-minute video that introduces the Priority Log /New Year Resolution spreadsheet, please see below:

Feel free to download the sample spreadsheet here: Priority Log / New Year Resolution Spreadsheet

What other tools do you use to help manage and prioritize your time?