You've tried setting and achieving goals before, we all have. You've probably spent hours online and reading about the goals you want to achieve, and just as many hours coming to the stark realisation: "Achieving goals is hard"

In this, the first step in setting and achieving your goals with the help of GTD and Evernote, we're going to tackle all the false starts you've had and start corraling the information you already you have at hand in Evernote while applying some Getting things Done (GTD) principles.

This first post will be the shortest in my series. The purpose of this step is simply to set up a trusted GTD system of collection in Evernote as well as collecting all the information you already have amassed which will assist you in achieving your goals and objectives with ease.

"A vision without a task is but a dream; A task without a vision is drudgery; A vision and a task is the hope of the world"

Collect everything

The GTD system that we're going to be setting up in Evernote is a very simple system to keep track of your resources and goals. We'll keep your list of goals in notes in Evernote, feel free to get creative with this, you can create images, put your goals as statements in a note or pdf file. Do whatever you need to do to get your goal statements into Evernote and make them easy to review.I'm a huge fan of GTD by David Allen. It is the seminal book on managing your productivity. You already have a lot of documents, magazines, newspaper clippings, books, brochures, reciepts in short stuff relating to your goals lying around right now. Go find it now so we can find it a home.

One place to collect them all

Okay if I’m going to achieve my goals this year I’m going to need lots of information. I’m also going to need to refer to most of it fairly often. The best way to keep my goals moving forward is to spend quality time on them. In order to do this I’ve organised my information into one trusted system, Evernote. The beauty of this is that I keep all my information in one place. I can search in one place for anything I may need. Example:

I want to finish the first draft of my novel by June 2010

In order to complete my goals I need to:

• Increase my knowledge about novel writing
• Do research for my novel
• write about 75 000 – 100 000 words

In order to move on to the last stage of my goal, the important bit, writing 75000 to 100 000 words, I need to complete the first two steps. In order to help myself achieve that, I’ll create 2 new notebooks in Evernote:

• Novel 2010 - I'll be using this notebook for all the things pertaining to achieving and tracking my ulitmate goal of getting my first draft written

• <Novel Name> Research - I'll be using this notebook for capturing and tracking all the information I've researched for my novel

I will use these two notebooks to save all the information around completing the first two steps of my goal of writing my novel.

Increase my knowledge about novel writing and do Research for my novel

Now i’m going to collect all my writing related:

• Books
• Magazines and Articles
• Courses
• Blogs and websites

Once I’ve found them all (well obviously not the blogs those are in ye old feed reader) I now have a very impressive pile which I’ll start capturing in Evernote soon. Go ahead and start going through your desk cupboards, all dark corners that your "stuff" may be hiding. In my next post I will take you through the process for capturing everything you may find and making sure it's search-able in Evernote so you can build a massive reference library that will not only support you in achieving your goals and getting things done but will also track your progress. This post forms part of my series Tracking Goals and objectives in Evernote: Part Two - Goal and Objective tracking in Evernote Pt. 2 – Capture Image Credits

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