October 27, 2026 · by Ian
Welcome Back
In mid-2006 I built Joe’s Goals for myself. I needed a simple way to track the things I wanted to do more of and the things I wanted to do less of. The result was a single-page weekly grid: click a cell to check a goal, watch your daily score, and use negative goals to confront the vices that needed to go. I added a logbook for notes.
The layout I went with was intentionally minimal—one page, no downloads, just clicks. You could add multiple checks in a single day, and there were only two icons. It was modeled after older paper systems like Benjamin Franklin’s virtue chart. Within weeks it got early attention: Lifehacker featured it and called it a slick way to track positive intentions and avoid negative ones. It hit Digg (remember that being a thing?), CNET, the Seattle Times, a number of blogs, and even a few early podcasts.
Over the next several years people used it for exercise, writing, diet, quitting habits, and simple accountability. While I made a few changes and even sold it to some businesses, it mostly stayed the same. Even though I got busy with other projects, I always felt it could be more while still keeping the simple interface.
I let it slowly degrade over the next decade, and it eventually went quiet.
And now it’s back. The idea is unchanged, but you can now mix in hundreds of icons, track daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals, use scoresheets for numbers like weight or spending, and keep logbooks for notes. It ticks a lot of the boxes (ha!) that I wanted in a modern goal tracker, and I hope you find it useful!
