If you count yourself among the huge number of people who have taken on New Year’s resolutions, chances are that you may have slipped up or given up already. Hey, it’s been almost a month, and keeping up with these things is tough, especially if you have a dozen goals, or one really big one.

Don’t give up, though. January 1st is just another day on the calendar. While the resolutions a new year inspires can be powerful, don’t forget that you have the power to give yourself a fresh start on your goal any day of the year.

So, let’s start over, and talk about keeping your new January 20th resolutions:

Break It Down

This has been my mantra on Task Blog for a while now, but I’m sticking to it: tasks that are too big and too general don’t get done. If you have a resolution like “lose weight” or “earn 10% more this year,” you should break it down so you always know your next action. Make an exercise schedule, give yourself a deadline for a new job application … just make it small and specific, and you’ll get there.

Use Moderation

Drastic changes in behavior can be quite intimidating, but there’s nothing wrong with easing into a resolution. Changing your entire diet might make you miserable, but cutting out one problem food at a time isn’t so bad. My biggest success with this strategy was bumping my daily word count up by a few hundred words. It didn’t seem like much more work, but the habit has stuck and added up.

Use the Buddy System

Maybe you promised you would get up early and do yoga this year, but you haven’t gone once. Heck, I can’t count on myself at 6 a.m., either. That’s why the buddy system is a good thing. If you know a friend is going to get up just as early and torture himself as much as you are, you’ll be more likely to follow through with your plans. Plus, you’ll have someone to celebrate with when you both reach your goals.

Try Some New Tools

Just before the new year, Anthony talked about using Task.fm reminders to keep on track with your resolutions. That’s an awesome idea, especially if you pair it with a tool that will let you visualize your progress. Maybe it’s just a paper calendar that you can fill up with Xs, or maybe it’s something a little more advanced. Lifehacker posted 10 tools for keeping new year’s resolutions, including the very useful Joe’s Goals goal-tracking app. Pick and choose the ones that work for you.

Don’t give up just because you haven’t been on track so far. Give yourself permission to start over, and I’ll be right here, telling you everything I’ve learned from my own productivity failures (hey, we all have them!).

Let us know what your resolutions are, and how they’re going, in the comments.

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He writes about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also follow him on Twitter and at his blog.

Photo Credit  — lioliz

When to Use SMS Reminders

I don’t know about you, but i’m pretty much within arms reach of my phone for the entire day.    So I can be fairly certain that I won’t miss an sms reminder.

Use SMS reminders for important events of for reminders that need to be sent while your on the go.

How to Create an SMS Reminder

By default Task.fm will send you an email reminder – but this can easily be changed for all reminders or on a reminder per reminder basis.  Here are four different ways you can start receiving sms reminders:

1. Change Default Reminder Type – If you would like all reminders to be sent via a text message, visit the settings page – depending on your account type and which services you have setup (phone, mobile, twitter etc.) you can select as many default reminder formats as you want.  For example you might want to receive all reminders via email and sms. If you don’t see the “sms” option, you will need to enter your mobile number first.
2. Add “via sms” to a Reminder – When creating a reminder, simply put “via sms” at the end.  For example enter “remind me to call bob tomorrow at 3pm via sms”.  in the reminder input box.  You can also use this trick when setting up reminders through email (reminder@task.fm) or Twitter.
3. Click the sms Icon – On the members homepage (the screen you see when logging in) which lists all your reminders, hover over a reminder item to bring up the options.  Then its a matter of simply clicking the sms icon
4. Advanced Reminder – On the advanced reminder page (click the link on the home screen) you can select to have a reminder sent via a text message.

What do you Use SMS Reminders For?

Let us know in the comments what you use sms reminders for – remember both free and pro users can send sms reminders.  So get productive and start sending yourself handy sms reminders.

Here we go, then: how to declutter a hopelessly messy workspace.

What needs to be there?

Instead of starting with the attitude of keeping everything and moving or throwing away things one by one, start with a blank desk and add back the stuff you can’t work without. My laptop and second display take up a ton of space on my desk, but I can’t very well get rid of them, because I use them for work. Other than that, I just need my phone, and occasionally a pen and pad.

What are you going to do with all that paper?

Paper is probably the biggest source of clutter in my work life. I don’t even use it, it just comes in the mail each day and never gets adequately processed. This is where you do as I say, not as I do, and process your paper as you receive it. Recycle, shred, file it in an inbox … do anything but allow it to grow across your desk and take over your space. Of course, avoiding paper in the first place is the best way to prevent this, but that’s a subject for another post.

Clear off your walls and floor

The workspace is more than just a desk. If you’re going to go truly distraction-free, make sure you’ve got unadorned, solid-colored walls in your field of vision. Also, don’t let too much junk pile up on the floor. I know it sounds crazy to the neat-freaks amongst you, but I can see a pile of dirty laundry on the floor out of the corner of my eye, taunting me as I write this post. That’ll never do.

Clean up your computer’s dock and desktop

You probably spend more time looking at your computer’s dock and desktop than anything else in your office, so keep them clean and free of distractions. I’m on a temporary detox from Twitter and Facebook right now — another subject that deserves its own post — and I’ve found that removing the bookmarks and apps associated with those sites also blocks my habit of clicking on them every 5 minutes while I’m working. The same goes for games and other time-wasters. Hide them anywhere but the desktop.

That’s obviously not everything you can do, but it’s definitely a good start. If you work from the premise that everything in your workspace has to be essential or very useful to earn its place, you should be able to maintain an environment that’s clean and distraction-free. You don’t have to be a monk, you just have to recycle your paper and take out your pizza boxes when you finish with them.

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He blogs about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also find him on Twitter.

Photo Credit – jeffreydenver

• Time. It may be unintuitive, but excess stuff and time are directly related. You have to spend time acquiring stuff. You have to deal with caring for it. You have to clean, organize, and care for it. You have to move it. And you have to go through it to find things whenever something is lost. Think about how many times you’ve lost your keys [or your checkbook!] in a pile of stuff in the past year; how many hours does this total? Before I got myself organized, I looked for three or four lost objects every day. Even still, I occasionally relapse and forget to put my gloves, my camera cord, or my favorite circular knitting needle in its place, leading to an impromptu search party to find what I need.
• Money.Clutter, by definition, is anything you don’t need, use, or want. So the cost of clutter includes the cost of unnecessarily procuring it. On top of that, you have to store the clutter, so you end up paying for a bigger space than an uncluttered person might otherwise need, just to have room for all your stuff. And when it’s time to get rid of clutter, you often have to pay someone to haul it away. And when you’re absolutely sure you have something but you have absolutely no idea where it is, you end up popping out to buy a quick replacement. [Full disclosure: I've done this with about twenty different items in the past few years, including my cell phone charger, my black pencil skirt, my aluminum water bottle, my iPod headphones, and my favorite pen. I don't even want to think about how much money I could have saved if I'd gotten myself organized sooner.]
• Productivity. When your stuff is cluttered, you have to declutter it to a certain degree before you start to work. If your kitchen is a mess right before you have to cook a Thanksgiving meal for twenty-seven people, you’re going to have to block out some time to figure out where you put your turkey baster and your casserole dish. If your sewing room is filled with wrinkled, dirty scraps, your fabric stash is disorganized, and you’re completely out of rotary blades and serger needles, you’re not going to be constructing any garments anytime soon. Not only that, but clutter can completely obfuscate some of the tasks you need to complete. If, as we said, your kitchen is a mess, how will you know that you’re out of milk, your knives need to be sharpening, and your egg beater is missing one of its blades? If your closet isn’t neat and organized, you’ll have no idea that none of your pants fit anymore, nor that your best white dress shirt is missing two buttons.
• Peace of mind. If you have a proverbial place for everything and everything in its place, you know exactly where to go to look for things, exactly how long it’s going to take to get things done, and exactly what you’re missing to complete your next action. However, if not, the time and effort you’ll need to put into completing a task—or whether you can even complete it at all—is up in the air.

Next week, I’ll be writing about how you can curb clutter to make it easier to be productive. Check back for more! In the meantime, how do you feel about clutter? Do you thrive on a neat environment, or do you draw inspiration from disorganization?

Amanda Lee Anderson is a writer and editor living in Cincinnati, Ohio, and New York City. She writes about fashion, music, productivity, and happiness. Read her blog or find her on Twitter.

Birthday Reminders

I always forget birthdays!  Task.fm provides a convenient place to store Birthdays:

Toms birthday “12th September” remind me on the 10th September

Website Bookmarks

How many times have you come across a website and gone “thats cool, but I’ll check it out later”.  And you end up forgetting about the site all together.  When this happens a shoot a quick Direct Message on Twitter:

d @taskfm visit thacoolsite.com in 2 days

Wake Up Calls

Pro Accounts in the U.S and Canada (very soon to be world-wide) can receive voice call reminders.  This means Task.fm is perfect for wakeup calls:

wakeup Anthony tomorrow at 9am via voice call

Free Pro Account

What do you use Task.fm for?  Share your ideas by leaving a comment below or Tweeting with the hashtag #taskfm and if we like….a free pro account is yours

Sometimes you want to be reminded earlier than the actual event.  From the settings page you could setup “remind me in advance”, but now we have added a way to do this when actually creating a reminder.  For example if I wanted to be reminded a day in advance about paying the water bill:

Pay the water bill by the “18th of July” remind me tomorrow at 10

This would send me a reminder Tomorrow with “pay the water bill by the 18th of July”.  Any times or dates will just be added to the reminder.  Another example.

meeting with Tom “at 2pm” remind me in 2 hours

It doesn’t matter where you put the quotes as long as you leave the actual time you wish to be reminder outside.