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Establish Goals that Drive You Towards Your Ultimate Life

Now that you've got your GTD system set up, and your keeping track of everything in Evernote.  Nothing is slipping through the cracks.  You're getting all of your tasks done.  You're ready to move on to what makes this system really, truly, life changing.  After all, getting tasks done is all well and good, but how do you know that you're really getting somewhere?  How do you ensure that you aren't just spinning your wheels doing busy work?  How do you ensure that all of these tasks and projects are building up to something fruitful?  The system you have in place gives you the ability to move really fast, but you need to ensure that you're moving in the right direction, otherwise you're going to end up at the wrong place.

 That is where a quality goal-setting session comes into play.

Good goal-setting starts at the top. The very top.  What do you want to accomplish before you die? What are your lifelong goals that will make up your legacy.  What will let you know that you've completed what you were put on this earth to do?  These are the really big ones, and we want to elicit them for four major areas of your life.  Success/Career, Relationships, Health, Spirit.  Or, Life, Mind, Body, Soul.  Or, Provider, Keeper of my Body, Lover/Friend, Searcher.  Or, Financial, Social, Physical, Spiritual.  There are plenty of ways to refer to the various areas in your life, there may even be areas of your life that you want to add.  The labels are just triggers to help spur your thinking.  At this very top level, you're focusing on what could be called Purpose or Principles.  You can have more than one for each category, or some that don't fit into categories, again these are tools to start you down the path.

Once you've identified your end goals, you want to start breaking them down into more manageable chunks.  We're going to do some backward planning here.  The next set of goals that you will want to create are your 3-5 year goals.  These are still big, multi-year endeavors, but are really just mile markers on your way to fulfilling your true purposes.  They are accomplishments, or prizes, along the way that show you're making progress towards your end game.  They make up your vision of your future, these are the things that you visualize to motivate you.  Of course you'll need to continually update all of these goals, as you accomplish them, you'll need to set new ones to keep you driving forward.

Next you will break down your vision goals into even smaller chunks, focusing on 1-2 year goals.  What do you need to accomplish first before you can get to your 3-5 year goals?  These items will make up your big immediate projects.  These are the things you'll be working directly on for the next foreseeable future.  You can start to see things coming into your reach now, you can start to identify with some of these 1-2 year goals and actually envision accomplishing them.  Some you might even get done early, within a year!

Next I like to think about a set of goals that aren't really goals, but more like Habits.  Often times you'll find that as you elicit your major goals and what it will take to get there, you realize that you need to adjust your habits.  These can be things like saving money, or managing your budget.  They can be areas of study that you want to keep up on regularly.  They can be adopting a healthier diet or a regular exercise program.  These things aren't necessarily goals in the traditional sense, as they don't have an end date and then they're accomplished.  They're accomplished regularly, and over time, and indefinitely onward.  They make up an important part of what is going to help you successfully reach your goals however, so they are important to capture and track.

And on back to your goals, we need to identify our short-term projects.  These are one year or less goals, things that may be small and only take you a month, or might take you the better part of a year.  Again, the timeframes are flexible here, the idea is to identify a golden thread that leads from your lifelong goals, all the way down to the immediate projects and actions that you need to perform today.  This is how you can crystallize your actions and be assured that they are moving you in the right direction.  These projects and short term goals will land directly in your GTD system with a .Project tag.

Which of course brings us to each discrete action.  This is the bottom of your goal elicitation chart.  For each project you have identified a 'Next Action'.  The very next, specific, thing that you need to do to move that project forward.  Thereby moving the associated 1-2 year goal forward, which gets you closer to the 3-5 year vision, which puts you significantly closer to your life-long goals and callings.  This way you can be sure that what you're spending time on today is aligned with what you want to accomplish in your life.  This ensures you are moving in a straight line directly towards your goals and the life that you want.

Keep in mind as you're setting your goals.  Goals that only exist in the future aren't ever going to do you any good.  You need to create goals that inspire or motivate you today.  Your goals should act on you in the present, they should cause you to do things differently right NOW.  Otherwise, they'll stay in the future and never get accomplished.  If your goal doesn't excite you and cause you to move towards it immediately by changing things in your life at the present moment, then it's not a goal worth having.

Sure, there will be plenty of actions and even projects that you work on that don't directly align with your higher purpose and goals, however the important thing is that we are tracking those things that do, and continually making progress.  And while you're at it, it doesn't hurt to use these categorizations as tools to help you prioritize your actions.  Which leads us to our next topic.

Prioritization - Accomplishing the Most Important Actions Every Time

So you have a bunch of tasks, next actions, sitting in your context lists.  You open even just one of those lists and you have 50 items to choose from.  There's no way that you can get them all done today.  You feel overwhelmed, you end up cherry picking the tasks that you think will be easiest or the most enjoyable.  Over time you realize that some tasks are getting ignored, they're sitting on your lists for weeks at a time and not getting done.  You're just picking the low hanging fruit over, and over again.  How do you decide what you should be working on at any given time?

You should be doing work based on the resources that you have available, which means the right context.  Luckily you have your actions divided up by context, so this is helpful.  Your energy level needs to be taken into account as well.  If you don't have the energy to perform a certain task, then making yourself do it isn't going to help anyone.  Time, is another factor.  How long to you have?  You need to select actions that can be accomplished in the time you have to work on them.  The choice should be intuitive as much as possible, we want to avoid spending a bunch of time creating an ordered list.  Numbering your tasks from most important to least important takes time, and it changes constantly, and it doesn't take into account the previously mentioned factors.  But you need some way to narrow down your choices, something to reduce the overwhelming feeling.

One definite thing to do is to make sure that everything on your next action lists is actually something that you want to get done.  If it's only an idea, or something that doesn't need to be done in the immediate future, put it on the Someday/Maybe list.  You're going to review this list weekly anyway, so you're not going to lose it forever, the task is still there.  But if it's not important enough to get done this week, it might be better served out of sight until you have the time.  The Someday/Maybe list is a lockbox for ideas that relieve your brain from being cluttered with them.

The next thing that might help is a "!CRITICAL" tag.  This is an action that you've identified as an important task, something that absolutely needs to get done this week.  We're not prioritizing all of our actions here, all we're doing is picking out the ones that stand above the rest.  The ones that are clearly more aligned with our projects and goals. The things that are going to move you forward the most.  The !CRITICAL tag will sort these items at the top of your list if you sort by Tags and will jump out at you, giving you that extra push you needed to help decide what tasks to pick of the list and accomplish.

One approach is to pick three actions that you want to get done each day.  Choose them the night before and assign !CRITICAL tags.  Then when you wake up in the morning, start with those three items before you do anything else.  Focus your work there and ensure that those three things get done.

Project Prioritization - What is Most Important to You

The same strategy can be applied to your projects.  A certain school of thought indicates that if you're working on more than three projects at a time you're spreading yourself too thin and don't have a reasonable chance to progress on any of them.  I personally think that's extreme, especially with the definition of 'project' that we've established.  However, I think it's reasonable to focus on three primary projects at once.  This allows you to align your thinking with the most important efforts you have going on at any particular time.  It does help to cut through the clutter if you have a bunch of projects going.

The way I accomplished this in Evernote is by augmenting the Active Projects tag with an "Auxiliary Projects" tag.  I use it the same way, with a single note representing the overview of the project itself, why I'm doing it and what I want to accomplish, that gets tagged with the Auxiliary Projects tag and makes up my project list.  Then tagging it and the supporting notes with a .projectname tag so that all the supporting material stays associated with each project.  Then I nest those .projectname tags underneath the Auxiliary Projects tag so that you can easily collapse them in your standard tag view.  Then I move all of my projects except for the three most important to the Auxiliary Projects tag.  I generally leave my Active Projects tag expanded so that those projects are sitting there staring me in the face all day long.  This ends up being similar to using the !CRITICAL tag, but at a project level.

Adding these advanced tactics to your GTD/EN system will provide you with even more laser focus and will make you absolutely unstoppable in attaining your goals.  With the addition of these tools, you've now expanded a simple task management system into a full dream-realization mechanism.  And it's foolproof.  With these techniques you can't help but drive forward on your goals and accomplish everything you set out to do.

If you haven't read the previous two articles on GTD and Evernote or need to review, you can find links to them below.  If you like these ideas or have other ways that work for you, post them in the comments.  Your additions may be the breakthrough for someone else!

Other articles in this series about GTD and Evernote:

Part 1 - GTD and Evernote

Part 2 - GTD and Evernote - Advanced Topics

Part 4 - GTD and Evernote - Tying It All Together