How to use Evernote and GTD for setting and achieving goals and objectives

If you’ve been using Evernote for any length of time, you’ll likely know all about Evernote’s great benefits and ease of capture. With the new year upon us though many of us have started setting goals and objectives which we’d, touch wood, like to achieve this year. If you haven’t already I suggest you start using Evernote to organize your lists today! I have yet to find a free note management system as flexible as this.

Setting goals in Evernote

So you want big shiny pretty goals and objectives for the new year, first things first. What areas are you going to be setting goals in.

• Social
• Work
• Family
• Hobbies
• Freelance work
• Health
• Charity
• ?

What areas in your life do you want to focus on? If you’re having some trouble with this try The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! These are both great books to put you in touch with the areas of your life  that Turn you on. Once you find these areas out, you’re on the way to setting goals in the right areas of your life.

In addition I’ll be publishing a couple of posts on how to set SMART and effective goals this week too.

Collect, Capture, Organize and Review

Using Evernote to set goals is a 4 prong process for me. Collect, Capture, Organize and Review. The strength of Evernote when it comes to Goal and objective setting is the ease of capture. Keeping track of our goals during the year ahead is not going to be easy. We need to keep track of everything that’s happening in our lives and affecting our goals and we need it in one place dammit. That one place for your goals this year is going to be Evernote.

Goal setting in Evernote, the series

I’ll be writing a Series of posts this week that will take you step by step through the process of applying principles from Getting Things Done (GTD) and the power of Evernote to create a watertight system to catch all the information in your life and put it into motion to keep you on track with your goals and objectives for 2010.

I will cover the process of:

Collection: Collecting information about the areas you’d like to achieve success in

Capture: How to get everything into your system

Organize: Set your system up to work for you. A simple system to organize your workspace and evernote for easy access to track your goals.

Review: Setting up a system of review that will keep your information up to date and keep you focused on your goals like a laser.

In the series I’ll look at a real life example of a goals I’d like to achieve this year.

• I will finish the first draft of my novel by June 30th 2010
• I will excercise for at least 30 minutes 3 times a week in 2010
• I will update my blog at least 4 times a week with quality content in 2010

I won’t unpack each goal in each example but I will use parts of my real plan to illustrate how you can apply GTD and Evernote to achieving your goals and objectives in 2010 and why Evernote is the best way for you to capture and track your goals in 2010.

I will be updating this page with each post in the course of next week so that it can be used to navigate the Goal tracking in Evernote series.

09 January – Goal and Objective tracking in Evernote Pt. 1 Collection, finding everything you’ll need

11 January – Goal and Objective tracking in Evernote Pt. 2- Capture everything into one trusted system i.e. Evernote

12 January – Goal and objective tracking Evernote Pt. 3- Organize your tags and categories for effective goal tracking in Evernote

13 January – Goal and objective tracking in Evernote Pt. 4 – Review your goals by setting up a trusted schedule for focused researchWhen I have completed the series I will collect it as a PDF guide and make it available to download with some additional printable resources.

Tags: evernote, Goal Tracking, goals, GTD, objectives, Personal Productivity

This entry was posted on January 8, 2010 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Evernote, Monetize Your Time, Setting and Tracking goals in Evernote. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.