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

By Michael Fletcher On January 8, 2010 · 33 Comments

Do you struggle with achieving your most important goals in life? Do you often feel as if you are a slave to clock? Has your office, home office or home become a cluttered and incoherent mess? If you're anything like me you're probably also constantly licking your wounds from the war against the creeping clutter which keeps trying to scale the walls of our mind.

Well I have good news for you, these are not problems at all. They are symptoms. Feeling disconnected from our goals, slaving away against the clock fighting the unending battle against clutter are all signs your personal organisation system is deficient. You do not trust it and with good reason. It simply doesn't work.

Evernote and a sprinkling of Getting Things Done Principles are all you need to get on back on track. If you haven't yet, click on the link to your right and join Evernote for free now. 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 constant pressure to perform and achieve our goals there is no better time than right now to start organizing our lives and moving closer to our goals.

Setting goals in Evernote

So you want big shiny pretty goals and objectives for the new more organized life you crave, 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 if you only ever own one personal development book, make sure it's this one. Seven habits challenged me to re-assess my purpose on the planet and reconnect with my values. I'm not exaggerating when I say living the Seven habits may change your life. or Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! I was very slow to take to Tony Robbins, his many many appearances on day time television left me with a bit of a sour taste. In addition I found Awaken the Giant a bit of a labor to read as the prose doesn't really flow and there is no noticably coherent narrative. However the book is packed to the brim with valuable and practical advice built on NLP principles. If seven habits is the map book to your goals, Awaken the Giant is the instruction manual for the car. 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. Eliminating the bad goals is almost as important as identifying the right goals.

Collect, Capture, Organize and Review

“'I need milk' and 'I need to decide whether to buy this company' both tie up space in psychic RAM. The solution is simple. Write it down. Look at it. Do it or say to yourself 'not now'.” David Allen author of Getting Things Done

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. GTD is a personal productivity system based on David Allan's seminal text, Getting things. Getting things done (GTD) truly is a manual for stress free productivity in your life. Getting things done (GTD) focuses on managing your own creativity and and energy levels rather than clinging to the illusion that time can be managed. GTD is focused on the nuts and bolts of keeping a trusted system of organisation which will free our mind to focus on the most important matters of your day. GTD is not about time, GTD is about peace of mind. Ok just in case you were unsure, I really highly recommend this book, if you haven't already read GTD, buy it now! 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 GTD focuses on this area most, ensuring complete capture is the only way to keeps our minds at peace. Organize: Set your system up to work for you. A simple GTD system to organize your workspace and evernote for easy access to track your goals. Review: Setting up a system of review based on GTD 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 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 in conjuction with Getting things done (GTD) is the best way for you to capture and track your goals in 2010.