Bucketlistly Catalogs Your Biggest Moments

Productivity and motivation seem to be the key notions of our age. Both are the topic of choice for many bloggers, and software developers continually produce apps and services which help you organize your activities. One such app is Bucketlistly, a charming to-do list manager with an element of gamification.

You might expect a regular, buy-milk-do-laundry task organizer, but Bucketlistly is something truly different. It aims to record the important, great events in your life through the concept of achievements, which should be familiar if you've played any of the recent video games. You build a list of things you want to achieve in life, track your progress, and once you've completed (that is, unlocked) them, share advice and photos with your friends. 

Of course, you could "cheat" and use Bucketlistly for your everyday tasks, but that would beat the intended purpose of the app. Besides, if doing the dishes counts as an achievement in your book, perhaps you should reconsider your outlook on life.

To start logging your achievements, you'll need to create an account. You can either log in with your Facebook credentials or sign up with an email address. If you're an avid Facebook user, you'll be happy to hear that Bucketlistly integrates very well with Facebook, enabling you to find and follow friends who also use Bucketlistly. You can also automatically share unlocked achievements, and Bucketlistly will recommend you new achievements based on your interests (Facebook Likes).

Bucketlistly is focused on the community and information exchange, so you can follow other people, comment on their achievements, leave tips, answer questions, and give a "Cheer Up" to their profiles, comments and goals. This is a great way to connect with people who have similar interests, and reading their success stories helps you push forward. The cutest thing about Bucketlistly are the badges you earn when you unlock achievements. Just the look of them makes me want to collect more. :)

The starting point is your Bucketlistly timeline. It really looks wonderful: the soothing color scheme imitates wood and leather, the layout is neat and intuitive, and your achievements are clearly in the spotlight.

From here you can explore all achievements, access your profile settings, change the profile picture and description, and add new achievements or goals. Goals are incomplete achievements (you can have up to 25 goals at a time) and they are displayed in a list separate from the unlocked achievements. 

The list shows information about each goal - when it was added, the number of comments and cheer-ups, category and a progress meter. Clicking on each goal will bring up its own page.

Here you can add more details about the goal itself, state the reason why you're doing it, inform the followers about its progress and add photos which are relevant to your achievement. You can also add achievements which you completed a long time ago; Bucketlistly does not limit you in any way.

Adding new goals is easy - you can either select an existing one, or create a custom one. To help you with this, they are sorted into categories (Travel, Wealth, Career, Relationship, Health, Self Growth), so make sure to categorize your custom goals properly.

Available goals range from (nearly) impossible, such as travelling the world and becoming a billionaire, to more easily accomplished, like learning to bake cookies and getting a tattoo. I've encountered some bizarre ones, like stealing a traffic sign and buying a gun, but hey - to each his own.

Once a goal is completed, it becomes an unlocked achievement and is displayed on your Bucketlistly timeline. Now you can share it on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. On the one hand, Bucketlistly might seem to be based on bragging, but then again, aren't all social networks more or less like that? Unlike Facebook, where people tend to share all sorts of mundane, mostly unimpressive information about themselves, Bucketlistly presents your personality in a different light. It emphasizes your strengths and what you're passionate about, so you can include a link to your Bucketlistly timeline on your social profiles, your website or even your portfolio.

It's also interesting to see who else is currently working on the same goal as you are, and which users have already completed the goal. You can click on their usernames to see their profiles, or access the list of all users from the toolbar on top of the page.

Users are sorted by popularity (the number of followers) and by success (the number of unlocked achievements). You can search for people you know, or connect with anyone simply by following them. Bucketlistly will even recommend some people for you to follow based on mutual achievements.

Bucketlistly is completely free to use, which is awesome. The Android and iPhone versions are in the making, so it will soon join the forces of to-do mobile apps alongside Carrot, Simplenote, Laza and Flow.
Make sure to check the official blog which, apart from news and updates about Bucketlistly, features inspiring and interesting stories.

Ivana Isadora Devcic is a freelance writer, copyeditor and translator fluent in English, Swedish, Croatian and Norwegian. She's a Linux user and KDE fan interested in web design, productivity and personal branding. Ivana tweets about the world around her as @skadinna.