2016, My System For Personal Organization

At some point you stop waiting for time. If you aren’t where you want to be in life, when you come to this realization, it can be an empowering, energetic, feeling. Hopefully. You take that energy and use it to build a bridge to that place you want to be.

I used it to develop a 10 year vision: then necessary goals and habits to get there. I had some difficulty developing a clear vision of what I want. I have not reviewed much of Brian Tracey’s material in detail, but the blog of his, I stumbled upon, provided some insight.

With a clear vision in mind, I wrote down goals and desired habits. I then set off to develop a system to track and measure my progress.

Having had difficulty in executing past goals, I needed to figure out a means to create milestones, time to work on these milestones, and a trigger to work.

I started by creating a time allocation schedule(in Google Sheets), to plot my routine to work on my goals and good habits, which I will review every Sunday.

I used Strides to create a dashboard and monitor and track my habits and goals. Some goals were better suited for Strides than others, habits were a great fit. For instance it was easy to set a habit to Meditate three times a week, and monitor progress. On the other hand, the App had difficulty accommodating my goals to read 12 books, or take two online-courses. I settled by creating a “reading” project in Strides and then created 12 milestones, one for each book I wanted to read in the coming year. Similarly, I created a separate project with two milestones, one for each course I want to take. To track these, I must manually enter and estimate my progress on a 100 point scale.

One large goal in particular, requires a significant number of milestones that will likely change as I progress and learn. This big hairy audacious goal(BHAG), is entered in Strides as a time average. In other words, I hope to commit 12 hours per week to start.

I created a Board in Trello to organize my thoughts and create tasks to achieve my BHAG.

And finally I used Evernote as a real world notebook to record anything that comes to mind that does not fit in one of my other systems.

You only have so much energy each day, don’t waste it on disorganization.