Archive for the ‘Evernote’ tag
12 Goals: Tools You Can Use
Before starting here, you might first want to read the introduction, Step 1, Step 2, & Step 3.
Twelve Goals (or 12 Goals) is a goal-setting program for beginners. If you’ve never set goals before – or if you’ve tried and failed – Twelve Goals can help get you unstuck and on path to achievement. There’s nothing magical or mystical about this process at all. In fact, it’s downright boring and overly practical; you aren’t going to find any talk about magnetism, psychic powers, or the law of attraction. What you’ll find is a systematic way to look at your personal goals over the course of a year, along with some step-by-step advice and accompanying tools to help you achieve them.
Twelve Goals is still very much a work in progress. My hope is that the program will adapt and evolve over the course of 2010 based on feedback from you! If you ever forget how to find these posts, they will be available at www.12goals.com (or www.twelvegoals.com).
Now that you’ve made your way through the details of the Twelve Goals program, it’s time to get serious by employing the use of some tools. These tools are meant solely to supplement your plan, not to replace or define it. In order to get the most out of these tools, you have to have your vision, your monthly goals, and your habits & tasks ready to execute throughout the year. These tools are only as good as your plan is. Far too many people in situations like this get more carried away with the tools themselves, tweaking every setting imaginable, instead of focusing on the thing that matters: the plan itself.
So before going further, please do spend the time to make sure your plan is as complete as you can make it.
It’s Hard To Focus If You Can’t Find Anything
One of the oft overlooked rules of focus and concentration is that friction must be avoided at all costs. Friction in this sense can be defined as anything that pulls you out of your zone and slows down forward momentum. As an example, frequent interruptions induce loads of friction for anything involving deep focus. But there are other things. Have you ever sat down to do something important and realized you forgot to grab something critical to your effort? Like a notebook full of notes or a file off of your office computer? Or have you ever rushed out of the house just to realize 15 minutes later that you have to turn around because you forgot your briefcase/purse/laptop bag? Not being able to find the things you need makes it difficult to focus on anything!
Sometimes it’s hard to even realize that this is what’s happening to you. It sounds a little crazy, but some people are so used to not being organized, they think it’s normal to spend 30-50% of their time just gathering what they need instead of actually doing the thing they set out to do. Naturally this means the effort either takes 30-50% longer – or worse, is rushed… sacrificing quality in the process.
Speaking from personal experience, at some point years ago I got so frustrated with forgetting things that I put some systems in place to prevent this from happening again. Of course it does still happen every once in a while but it’s far less frequent these days than it used to be.
Look, it’s just far easier to stay organized than it is to deal with the ramifications of not being organized. Having a base level of organizational ability will “grease the skids” and make any effort far more effortless. But like anything else, it requires a little effort to first know what to do, and then secondly form a long-term habit to make sure it sticks.
