Mecanbe, the goal-oriented progress site that helps you track your milestones, has launched its private beta today. You can use Mecanbe’s tracking tools for personal or team goals. While not as quantitative and explicitly team-directed as services like LiquidPlanner, there are a number of features that aid in the goal-tracking process, including self-assessments, task outlines, and support groups.
Similar to Goalmigo, a core concept of Mecanbe’s overall service is accountability, which you’ll be responsible for. This is measured through the reports you complete, but there are other aspects to Mecanbe which sound far less serious and are quite practical in presenting you with an outlet for self-expression regarding your goals, while helping to inspire others and spread the wealth of information garnered through this sharing of personal experience.
Accomplished through blogs, social media-sharing integration (i.e. Flickr imports), and HTML comments that let others submit things like inspiring song playlists to help the overall community stay on track, the blogging and reporting functions on Mecanbe can be quite helpful.
When thinking of such services, I often cringe because I have a terrible time with self-motivation (especially in the morning) and typically find that sites like Mecanbe only require more self-motivation in order to just maintain a single task. But the ability to hone in on tasks as they relate to each goal makes Mecanbe a useful service that automates enough of the process that the value received from participating in this type of progress-tracking site outweighs the downsides.
For instance, if your goal is to lose 25 pounds by Christmas, then you can orient your tasks around different aspects of the weight-loss process–one task could be directed towards your diet while another could be directed towards your daily workout. This gives you a more comprehensive look at your actions and how they interrelate to your overall progress, meaning you can see whether or not your diet needs to be tweaked instead of your workout plan. Such automated research and output is quite useful, and as mentioned previously on Mashable, such a service can eventually be optimized for corporate use and other forms of team-building.