Goalton.com is a productivity service without a single flaw

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Anyone who has tried to increase personal productivity using mind maps has inevitably faced a situation where a project idea is well represented in the form of a diagram, but it is very difficult to understand how to make a todo-list out of it for subsequent work. And it would also be great to immediately decompose individual tasks into cards, like in Trello, or add them to your diary calendar. There were no services with similar capabilities before. It was not before.

Beginning of work

After logging in, you see a screen with the selection of the required project. The projects themselves are styled like notebooks, and the user can set a cover for each to better navigate.

If you put a picture symbolizing your goal as a cover, this will serve as an additional incentive to achieve it.

Here you can also see the current statistics: hover the mouse pointer over the project of interest and you will see the number of tasks and the percentage of their completion.

Create mind maps

The first step in creating a project is brainstorming. For this, there is a function for creating mind maps, the effectiveness of which the Lifehacker has an excellent longread about.

The mechanism for preparing a mind map is no different from the classic one - you add new elements, drag and drop them and change the appearance (format and color). An interesting feature is focus mode: if you need to delve into working with a specific branch of the mind map, temporarily hide other unnecessary branches from the overview. To switch to this mode, click the triangle at the beginning of any circuit element. You can return to the required level of comprehension with the help of "bread crumbs".

The data for the mind map can be imported from any other system or from a regular bullet numbered list. There will be no problems with exporting data either - 4 upload formats are supported at once, from plain or formatted text to support for Markdown or OPML. In the latter case, the data can be loaded almost anywhere.

Shaping ideas

Once you've laid out the core of your ideas with your mind map, Goalton suggests going into outliner mode and giving your thoughts a clear structure. Outline is the basis of the entire system, most of all it looks like a tree with hierarchically nested tasks. For detailed study of tasks, you can switch to focus mode here.

Special options will help turn abstract ideas into concrete tasks: deadline, responsible employee and stage.

We will talk about the stages later, this is an extremely powerful functional area of Goalton, which needs a separate conversation. Let's start with contacts - you can create a built-in directory in the system, a kind of address book, where you can enter information about both a person and the whole organization, its area of work and contact persons. You will be able to easily get the necessary information directly from the outline; you do not need to switch to other modes.

Click on the eye icon - the columns will disappear, and you will be presented with a text editor, in which it is convenient to take notes, write something or take notes on lectures.

We draw up a work plan

A very important point in Goalton is the task completion date, it allows you to use another mode of operation - weekly. The creators of the project say that it was this mode that users liked more than others, and maintaining an electronic weekly in a format almost similar to the traditional paper version turned out to be very effective.

Outline tasks are immediately displayed in the weekly, where they can be moved and edited. The weekly has flexible settings for the number of days required to complete the task and filtering projects.

Filters are a very useful thing: with one click you separate personal tasks from business ones, as a result, you have complete clarity with all projects.

In a similar way, you can present tasks from other projects in the work teams for which you are part.

Goalton marks completed tasks using the familiar checkbox, and highlights overdue tasks with color. The service's creators ditched the use of labels, finding that this flexibility was too tempting for users. Tasks become less structured, which inevitably leads to a decrease in productivity. Labels are successfully replaced by a more functional project mechanism. The system maintains task statuses - important ones get high priority and are highlighted visually.

Summing up the interim results

The fourth mode - todo - is more of a report. The creators of Goalton believe that the to-do list should not be formed as a list where the user can arbitrarily enter certain tasks, but as a result of current work with projects. The system independently compiles a list of tasks that must be completed in the near future. Todo-list, structured in a classic form, makes it possible to see a complete summary of important or overdue cases, as well as tasks for today, tomorrow, the coming week and month.

All submissions of the Goalton service are supplied with printed forms, which provide a finished, beautiful product that can be safely handed out to partners at a business meeting.

We work on kanban

Goalton's fifth mode is a kanban board. This will especially delight Trello lovers, who will find a familiar look here. However, the ideology is slightly different. In the Goalton concept, each project has its own sequence of steps or stages. They can be easily customized in the settings for specific needs. By default, each project consists of four stages, but you can create any number of them, forming the necessary flow or funnel (workflow).

There are two important properties in the project settings - the maximum number of days that a task card can spend without moving (max days) and a limit on the number of tasks at this stage (work-in-progress limit). Of course, in life, you or your colleagues are more likely to violate these limits - in this case, the system will highlight overdue tasks or exceeded limits.

Goalton maintains the concept of a transaction for which a counterparty, amount and estimated closing date are specified. If you place deals on this board, the latter will automatically turn into a sales funnel, showing the bottlenecks of the sales channel, and will allow you to close deals, marking their success.

This functionality puts Goalton on a par with the Salesforce class products. The user can view reports on his transactions for different time intervals and track the history of relationships with each client. From the point of view of entrepreneurs and startups, Goalton covers all business issues: from the idea of a product to the calculation of cash at the checkout.

Projects created in Goalton can be shared with colleagues at work. To do this, users can unite into teams by sending invites to each other, and the team administrator has all the necessary powers to set up access rights. In addition, the project can be made public - in this case, you can share your lists, notes or checklists with other users. If you wish, you yourself can copy the project or template you like to your library.

At the moment, Goalton.com does not have mobile applications for smartphones, but the fully adaptive mobile layout of the service allows you to comfortably use the system on any tablet or smartphone. At the same time, some modes have been completely redesigned to make working with them from mobile devices as convenient as possible.

Goalton.com is free for private use and teams of up to 5 people.

Let's pay tribute to the developers: they did not cut the functionality in order to sell some features in the pro version later. Whichever tariff plan the user chooses, all system functions are available to him.

Goalton is currently undergoing mass beta testing, and the official release in the US took place on April 15, 2016. Users who registered before July 1 will receive a lifetime free pro account.