Come Wednesday, April 15, you'll be seeing a little row of boxes towards the top of your screen when you visit DigitalScrapbook.com. That's our new Creative Goal Tracker! It's a flexible little tracker that will help you stay on track for completing your creative goals. (But don't worry: if you don't like it, you can disable it on your account settings page.)

The tracker defaults to a monthly view, so you can use it on an ongoing basis to track your creativity. Just log into DigitalScrapbook.com and click "yes" to mark a day successful. This default tracker will keep track of your success indefinitely so you can see how long you can keep up a creative streak.

Start a Specific Challenge

If you'd like to get a bit more specific with your creative challenge, click on the "start a challenge" link that comes up in a tooltip when you hover over the little "i" help icon. Set the information as you like and then the number of boxes you have will correspond to the number of days you set for the challenge.

How to use the tracker

This creative streak tracker is designed to be basic and flexible, with the idea that you can use it however you want to help track your creative output--there are no rules or regulations about how you need to use it or not use it, and remember that no goals are too small. Maybe your goal is to scrapbook for 10 minutes a day, or maybe it's just to log into a scrapbooking site, or to leave a nice comment on someone's layout. Our hope is that it might help and encourage you, whatever your creative capacity at the moment.

We made the tracker work on a daily basis, because there's a lot of research around habits and goal setting that suggests that having small, attainable daily goals is a helpful practice (for example, you might break up the weekly goal of "make a scrapbooking layout" into a daily goal of "spend 15 minutes every day working on a scrapbooking layout." But of course you can also use the tracker to track weekly goals, or every-other-day goals, as you like--don't feel that you have to check those boxes on a daily basis if that's not your style.

Once again: we hope this will be a useful and encouraging tool for some of you. If you don't find it useful, feel free to turn the feature off in your account settings. Do whatever works for you!

Join the Lockdown Challenge

If you want to set your tracker up for the Creative Lockdown Challenge, I've done a sample here. Make sure you use the tag "2020 lockdown challenge" so we can find all the challenges for admin purposes. If you don't have an image, that's fine. You can always use a layout if you'd like.

Work in Progress

This tracker widget is definitely in a beta stage at the moment. Please let us know if you find it useful, and how we might improve it to best suit your needs!