Martha Rotter's Blog

I’m work­ing on a small pro­ject which involves per­sonal data track­ing, so I’ve been doing a bit of user research on people who set goals and track their pro­gress towards them.

43Things is a pop­u­lar and easy-to-use site for set­ting goals and record­ing your pro­gress, and I’ve enjoyed using it in the past myself.  I figured they might have some use­ful inform­a­tion on what types of goals people are set­ting and track­ing today as well as some pre­dict­ors for success.

On their “Zeit­geist” page, 43Things aggreg­ates some inter­est­ing lists from mem­ber data such as all-time most pop­u­lar goals (“lose weight” is the top goal by far), new goals (“Become the next Frank Sinatra” was on there as I was writ­ing this), pop­u­lar goals today, and more.

I took the list of top 100 all-time goals and list of top 100 achieved goals and merged them to see where the over­laps are, where the gaps are, and if there is a cor­rel­a­tion between pop­u­lar goals set and pop­u­lar goals achieved.  I found some inter­est­ing things.

THINGS PEOPLE ACHIEVE:

If you reg­u­larly set per­sonal or pro­fes­sional goals for your­self, it won’t sur­prise you to learn that the goals with the highest num­ber of achiev­ers are gen­er­ally meas­ur­able. It’s prob­able that no one marked off hav­ing achieved “Get in shape” or “Be more con­fid­ent” because they’re hard to quantify. “Lose weight” is a bad goal because unless you give your­self a bit more guid­ance, it is dif­fi­cult to say when it’s accom­plished.  “Lose ten pounds in three months by decreas­ing my soda and snacks intake and work­ing out three times a week” is def­in­itely more wordy, but it’s also more con­crete and has a higher like­li­hood of success.

I won’t try to argue if the top achieved goal, “Fall in love”, is quan­ti­fi­able, but most of the top achieved goals are, in fact, very measurable.

THINGS PEOPLE IDEALLY WANT TO DO BUT DON’T:

The next inter­est­ing thing is the gaps where lots of people are set­ting goals but no one seems to be achiev­ing them. Some of these are, as above, not so meas­ur­able.  But oth­ers are more along the lines of “things I’d like to say I did, but I don’t have the time or the pas­sion.”  There are quite a few lan­guage learn­ing goals in this cat­egory, as well as things that require a large com­mit­ment of time such as run­ning a mara­thon, trav­el­ing the world or writ­ing a novel.

THINGS PEOPLE DO WITHOUT EXPLICITLY SETTING A GOAL:

Have you ever writ­ten a to-do list, and then thrown an item or two on there that you’ve already fin­ished? Just to make you have some feel­ing of accom­plish­ment? I have, espe­cially if the day’s task list looks end­less. The last inter­est­ing cat­egory I noticed seemed to be these things. Things people did without real­iz­ing it was a goal they wanted to achieve. Gradu­at­ing from school, get­ting a pass­port, donat­ing blood, doing ten full push-ups all fall into this cat­egory.  They’re often not the types of goals people think they need to be stra­tegic to achieve, but that’s not to say they’re any easier than the other goals.

CREATING THE CHARTS:

I used a JavaS­cript chart­ing lib­rary called Highcharts. Highcharts is incred­ibly simple to get up and run­ning, and they have a lar­ger vari­ety of chart types than many other chart­ing pack­ages, includ­ing stacked bar charts which I wanted to use to show some of the gaps in cer­tain goals. 43Things actu­ally has an API you can use to pull this type of inform­a­tion dynam­ic­ally, so it would be pos­sible to cre­ate a dynamic ver­sion of these goal num­bers quite eas­ily to do some­thing inter­est­ing like track increases or decreases of cer­tain goals over the course of time or with respect to cur­rent events (e.g., there are prob­ably more people with the goals of “Get out of debt” and “Pay off mort­gage” today versus five years ago!).

[UPDATE-30/8/2011]BLOG POST FROM 43THINGS:

The cre­at­ors of 43Things.com, The Robot Co-op, fea­tured my blog post on their  excel­lent blog about 43Things & the other pro­jects they build.  You can read the post here: http://blog.robotcoop.com/2011/08/30/fun-with-43-things-data/.  Thanks for tak­ing a look, Robot Co-op, and keep up the great work!

[UPDATE-27/8/2011]ALTERNATE VIEWING OF INFORMATION:

It was sug­ges­ted that since Highcharts doesn’t work in some mobile browsers, I include an altern­ate form of view­ing the data, so I’ve added the images below in case that helps.  Thanks for the great suggestion.