Using Life Tango to Develop A Life List
Another site that looked like a great way to develop a life list is Life Tango. This post will walk you through my experience with the site. For now, I’m not going to reference my SuperViva life list that I recently created.
I went straight to the Brainstorming Wizard to kick things off. Honestly, this part wasn’t that helpful for me. It consisted of two questions per category (Travel, Education, Career, Financial, Family, Health, and Spiritual), like “Where would you like to go on vacation?” or”What’s the one thing you want to do with your family?”. It didn’t really inspire me. I guess I was expecting more choices or different questions. I ended up with 7 goals, none of them really interesting. This method might be more useful for someone who hasn’t really thought about life goals before.
Next I went through the Learn More tab, where they suggested I refine my goals using the SMART method (this involves making sure each goal is Specific, Measurable, Admirable, Realistic, and Time-based. I’m a big believer in using the SMART method for goal creation, so was happy to see it. However, I didn’t see much value in working on my seven goals since I ended up with better ones using the SuperViva method. Next I checked out the Community tab, hoping to find some good goals from others that would inspire me. The 10 most popular goals were a little weren’t that relevant to me (two of them had to do with drinking more water). I decided to dig into goals by specific category. I started off with the Arts and Entertainment category. What was annoying about this feature was that the same goal is repeated throughout, every time a user has it. For some reason, A LOT of people are interested in writing a novel and going glow bowling. It was also hard to read, since there was a lot of white space between the goals. I didn’t find any that really inspired me.
I went to the Business and Career category next. About halfway through, I gave up. Nothing was really interesting to me. I decided to try the Travel category as one last ditch effort for inspiration. I did find one goal, ‘Vacation in Australia’, that I liked. In order to add this goal to my own list, I had to click through two or three screens. This was a lot harder than on SuperViva, where you just clicked the ‘Add this Goal’ button next to the goal, and it automatically did it. Again, having to see the same goal repeated over and over again with every person that had adopted it was annoying. Also, because of the way the brainstorm questions are worded, many of the goals are just single words, like ‘Japan’, or ‘Europe’. Taken on its own, it is hard to understand exactly what the goal is - backpack through Europe, visit the Eiffel Tower, learn a European language?
At this point, I realized that this site wasn’t going to do it for me. SuperViva was significantly better at helping me brainstorm and select ideas, and the features for tracking goals seemed at least as good as at Life Tango. I’ll post a final evaluation shortly.