Goals & Progress
Where goal tracking usually falls apart
Most goal tracking dies at the same place. You write down what you want, you break it into a list, and three weeks later the list has no visible connection to the year it was supposed to serve. This goal tracker is built the other way round. You start by rating ten life areas on two numbers, satisfaction and importance, and the gap between them, weighted by how much the area matters, tells you where a goal is worth setting. Then you cascade that goal down through six levels until it reaches something you can do today.
It runs in your browser, keeps your data on your own machine, and asks for no signup. The ten life areas and the six cascade levels are the same ones inside the Life Goals App, so nothing you build here has to be relearned if you move over.
Start on the Life Areas Map: drag the two sliders for each area, look at which area comes out top of the priority list, and turn that one into a Summit Goal. Everything else follows from there.
The ten life areas
Life goals are easier to choose when the ground they cover is named. The tracker splits a life into ten areas: Physical Health, Emotional Wellbeing, Relationships, Career, Financial, Growth and Learning, Fun and Recreation, Purpose and Meaning, Environment, and Contribution. You rate each one twice, on how satisfied you are with it now and on how much it matters to the life you want, and the distance between those two numbers is where a goal is worth setting.
| Life area | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Physical Health | The body that carries you through every other area. Sleep, movement, eating, and energy levels here ripple into your mood, focus, and how you show up for the people you love. |
| Emotional Wellbeing | Your inner climate: how you handle stress, hold steady under pressure, and recover from setbacks. This is the area that quietly shapes every relationship and decision you make. |
| Relationships | The people you live with, love, work with, and lean on. Strong relationships are the single best predictor of long-term wellbeing in research; weak ones drain everything else. |
| Career | Where you spend most of your waking hours. This is about the work itself, its meaning, growth, autonomy and fit, not just the paycheck. |
| Financial | Money as a tool, not a score. Includes income, savings, debt, and the freedom your finances give you to make choices that match your values. |
| Growth & Learning | The slow, deliberate expansion of who you are, through reading, courses, conversations, and reflection. Without it, the other areas tend to plateau. |
| Fun & Recreation | Real play, rest, and joy. The area that reminds you why all the effort is worth it, and the first one most ambitious people quietly cut. |
| Purpose & Meaning | The “why” behind your day. Without this, success in other areas can feel hollow; with it, even hard seasons feel survivable. |
| Environment | The spaces you can shape: your home, your workspace, and the places you choose to spend time in. |
| Contribution | How you give back beyond your immediate circle. Mentoring, volunteering, giving: meaningful contribution often correlates with deeper life satisfaction than any private win. |
How the priority score works. Gap is 10 minus your satisfaction score. Priority is that gap multiplied by importance. An area you are unhappy with but do not much care about scores low and is a preference, not a goal. An area that matters enormously and is going badly scores high, and that is where a Summit Goal belongs. The highest possible priority score is 90.
Physical Health
The body that carries you through every other area. Sleep, movement, eating, and energy levels here ripple into your mood, focus, and how you show up for the people you love.
Emotional Wellbeing
Your inner climate: how you handle stress, hold steady under pressure, and recover from setbacks. This is the area that quietly shapes every relationship and decision you make.
Relationships
The people you live with, love, work with, and lean on. Strong relationships are the single best predictor of long-term wellbeing in research; weak ones drain everything else.
Career
Where you spend most of your waking hours. This is about the work itself, its meaning, growth, autonomy and fit, not just the paycheck.
Financial
Money as a tool, not a score. Includes income, savings, debt, and the freedom your finances give you to make choices that match your values.
Growth & Learning
The slow, deliberate expansion of who you are, through reading, courses, conversations, and reflection. Without it, the other areas tend to plateau.
Fun & Recreation
Real play, rest, and joy. The area that reminds you why all the effort is worth it, and the first one most ambitious people quietly cut.
Purpose & Meaning
The “why” behind your day. Without this, success in other areas can feel hollow; with it, even hard seasons feel survivable.
Environment
The spaces you can shape: your home, your workspace, and the places you choose to spend time in.
Contribution
How you give back beyond your immediate circle. Mentoring, volunteering, giving: meaningful contribution often correlates with deeper life satisfaction than any private win.
A goal tracker for your whole life
Rate your ten life areas on satisfaction and importance, turn the highest-priority areas into Summit Goals, and cascade each one down through the year, the quarter, the month, the week and the day. Everything stays in this browser.
Where you stand, and where it matters
Two numbers per area. Satisfaction is how the area is going right now. Importance is how much weight it carries in the life you want. Priority multiplies the gap (10 minus satisfaction) by importance, so the areas at the top of the list are where a Summit Goal belongs.
Drag either dot on the map, or use the sliders. Click an area name to jump to its card.
Rename an area by typing over its name. Turn off the ones that do not apply to you. The ten defaults are the same ten the Life Goals App uses.
The cascade, six levels deep
A Summit Goal is a five to ten year outcome in one focus area. Everything below it exists to move it: the year, the quarter, the month, the week, the day. Pick a level to work at, and every item shows the parent it serves.
Plan forward, look back
Every level runs the same loop. Close out what is open, write down what moved and what got in the way, then name the next step at the level below. Day and week are reflections, month and quarter are check-ins, the year is a wrap-up.
Weekly reflection
History
This page holds the picture: your ten areas, the gaps, and the cascade from Summit Goal down to today. The Life Goals App runs that same cascade day to day, on the same ten areas and the same six levels. It also brings the check-ins to you on schedule, which is the part a page you have to remember to open cannot do.
The beta is free to join. Give one piece of feedback during the beta and you get the full app free when it launches.
The same six levels, running on a schedule instead of on memory.
What this goal tracker does differently
Almost every goal tracking app is a list with a progress bar attached. You add goals, you tick things off, and the app has no opinion about whether the goals were worth setting or whether they connect to anything larger. That works fine for errands. It does not work for the goals that take years, because those are exactly the ones that lose their thread.
Two things here are different. The first is that goals have to earn their place: an area only becomes a candidate once you have rated it on both satisfaction and importance and its priority score is high. An area you are unhappy with but do not care much about is not a goal, it is a preference. The second is that every item names its parent. A daily task sits under a weekly step, which sits under a monthly priority, which sits under a quarterly goal, an annual goal and finally a Summit Goal five to ten years out. You can see the whole chain, so you can see when the bottom of it has drifted away from the top.
Why satisfaction alone is not enough
Rating your life on a single score is the standard move, and it produces a familiar mistake: the lowest score wins your attention whether or not it deserves it. Someone can score Contribution at 3 and Career at 6, and still be right to work on Career, because Career carries ten times the weight in the life they are building. Two numbers separate those cases. The tracker multiplies the gap (10 minus satisfaction) by importance, and that priority score is the thing you act on.
Walkthrough of the goal tracking system
Here is the tool as it runs, following one case from the first slider to a task for today: a product lead who scores Career low, cares about it enormously, and has never connected the promotion she wants to anything she does on a Tuesday.
How the six levels work
Six levels sounds like six piles of work. It is the opposite. Each level exists to cut the one above it down to something the level below can carry, and the caps do the cutting.
- Summit Goal. A five to ten year outcome in one focus area. Three at most, one per focus area.
- Annual Goal. What has to be true in twelve months for the summit to be closer. Three per area at most.
- Quarterly Goal. The slice of the annual goal that belongs to the next ninety days.
- Monthly Priority. The quarter distils to at most two priorities a month, across every area at once. This is where a plan stops being a wish list.
- Weekly Step. The work you will do in seven days to move the month.
- Daily Task. One main task tied to a focus area. The lightest level, and the one that pays for the rest.
The check-ins run on the same loop at every level, with the vocabulary changing to match the weight. Day and week are reflections, month and quarter are check-ins, the year is a wrap-up.
Who this personal goal tracker is for
People who already know what they want and keep losing the thread between the year and the week. If you have a plan that survives January and evaporates by March, the missing piece is usually the month, and this is the level most goal tracking tools skip. It also suits anyone rebuilding after a change of job, city or circumstance, because the Life Areas Map is a fast way to find out which parts of your life took the hit.
It is built for one person tracking their own life. There are no teams, no shared boards and no manager view.
Example: one goal from the summit to Tuesday
She rates Career at 2 for satisfaction and 10 for importance, which puts an obvious spike on the map, and marks it a focus area. The Summit Goal is to lead a product team she would want to work for. The annual goal underneath is to ship the platform rewrite and hire two engineers. The quarter takes a slice of that: get the rewrite to a working beta with the first two services live. The month cuts it further, to cutting over the billing service. The week is writing the migration plan and getting it reviewed. Tuesday is drafting the rollback section.
Six rows, one chain, and the last one is small enough to do before lunch. When she ticks it, the progress rolls back up the chain to the summit.
How to use the Life Areas Map
- Rate all ten life areas on satisfaction and on importance. Rename or turn off the ones that do not fit your life.
- Read the priority list. Mark the top two, plus a third if it is close behind, as your focus areas.
- Write one Summit Goal per focus area, with a five to ten year horizon.
- Use Plan the level below to walk each Summit Goal down through annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily.
- Add key results where a goal needs a number rather than a sentence.
- Run the check-in that matches the cadence you are in, and let the history build up.
- Use Save file now and then. Browser storage is not a backup.
What you get
- Ten life areas rated on satisfaction and importance, ranked by priority score
- A six-level cascade where every item names the goal it serves
- Progress that rolls up the chain from a ticked task to the summit
- Focus caps shown as guidance at the moment you cross them, never as a block
- Check-ins with their own history, in the cadence vocabulary the method uses
- Key results in counts, currency, percentages or a simple tick
- Drag to reorder, with arrow buttons for anyone who would rather not drag
- Save and load your own file, and data that never leaves your browser
The method behind the tool
The structure is not invented for this page. It is the Goals and Progress method: look at your values and your life areas, turn the highest-priority areas into Summit Goals, cut the route from the summit down to today, plan for the obstacle before it arrives, and check the map on a cadence so you correct course before you drift. The articles below go into the research each part rests on.
Related articles and guides
- Goal Tracking Systems: The Complete Guide - what makes a tracking system hold up over a year
- Short and Long Term Planning Guide - how the horizons fit together
- Multi-Goal Tracking Orchestration - running several goals without dropping all of them
Related planning tools
These free tools cover the steps on either side of this one:
- Core Values Finder - the step before the map, and the same 28 values the app uses
- Goal Cascading Planner
- Personal OKR Quarterly Tracker
Frequently asked questions
Where is my data stored?
In your own browser, using localStorage. It survives closing the tab and it never reaches a server, which also means it does not sync between devices and does not survive clearing your browsing data. Use Save file to write a copy to your machine, and Load file to bring it back. The tool tells you if the browser is blocking storage.
Is this goal tracker free?
Yes, and there is no signup. Nothing is held back behind an email address. The Life Goals App is a separate thing, and its beta is free.
I used the old version. Is my data gone?
No. The first time you open the new version it reads your old data, maps your seven domains onto the ten life areas, and carries across every goal, key result and milestone, including archived goals. It then tells you in plain language what changed. Your previous save is left on the browser untouched, and old .save files still load through Load file.
How many goals should I track?
The method caps it: three focus areas, at most three annual goals in each, and at most two priorities in any month. That works out at far fewer active threads than most people start with, which is the point. The tool shows you when you cross a cap and leaves the decision to you.
Can I use it on my phone?
Yes. The layout folds to a single column and the sliders, the cascade and the check-ins all work by touch. Reordering has arrow buttons as well as a drag handle. A larger screen is easier for the first pass over the Life Areas Map, because you can see the chart and the ten cards at the same time.
How is this different from a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet will hold the same rows. What it will not do is tell you that a task has no parent, that an area has four annual goals when the cap is three, or that a month is carrying five priorities. The structure is the product here, not the storage.
What is a Summit Goal?
A single outcome five to ten years out in one focus area, written as a result rather than an activity. It is the top of the cascade, and everything below it exists to move it. You want one per focus area, so two or three in total.
Ready to map it out?
The whole tracker is above, free, with no signup and nothing to install. Ten sliders and one Summit Goal is about ten minutes of work, and it is the ten minutes that decides whether the rest of the year has a shape.
There is more to explore
This tool is one of a set of free planning tools, each built for a different step: finding your values, picturing the future, cascading a goal, planning a quarter, reviewing a year. Browse the full planning tools collection to find the one that matches where you are.
