Time Management

Today we share little knowledge about useful and productive motivation technique. Motivation board is recommended by many experts on the field of motivation and productivity. It is very simple logic: you really should know your objectives to get them done. But the knowing is somewhere in the land of memory and we forget, we forget a lot, so it should be somewhere placed or written.

Motivation board is ideal tool for such a job. It can be made of cork table with photos, sketch on flipchart, Post-it sticked right on the frame of computer display, few words written by permanent marker on your wrist. That is the way! Dirty, but very useful.

My life goals are…

Things suposed to be on motivation board are your life goals. To have true life goals, not just kid wishes, you should make them:

1. Sharp - anybody can (and does) dream about car, house or life mate. These are true life goals, but in most cases we do not give them concrete shape. It will help you so much if you dream little more and virtualy build your future. This vision will navigate you right there.
2. Time definined - you should seriously pursuit your happiness. That is the reason why goal should have deadline or time frame. It is not important if you achieve goal in the time you decided, but having a certain day in the future as the time when you want to have your dream realised is another intuitive source to power and to speed up your actions. Use reasonable time intervals like months or years. Something you can do in few weeks is not a life goal.
3. Big - only small people have small goals. Goal must be so exciting and so huge that it bring you to dreaming every day of your life. Size of your goal is the power for your actions.
4. Few - do not spend all your initiative, time and resources in vain attempt to realize twenty big dreams. You might make them all, but it requires more time. And that may frustrate you so much that under stress you fail. It is recommended to have 3 - 6 life goals, but organize it by yourself.
5. Always on sight - that is the reason for motivation board. Keep your dreams close to you so they may become part of your life.

Motivation diagram

Lets draw example of motivation diagram? Never heard before? Nor did I. I just forged it now to help understand and  measure life goals motivation. Perhaps it can be used also in some other way. You are all welcome to shout your propositions in the discussion.

What is sketched there? Circle  in the center is time clock with non-linear scale. That is becouse more goals we concentrate in nearer future. Distance of each goal from the circle (length of arrow) is measure of importance, position on the time scale is urgency. These two measures are also used in various time-management techniques, e.g. in The Eisenhower Matrix, which we will discuss next time.

Back to present: this kind of diagram you may draw for yourself and stick or pin it up onto your wall, cork table or put it under transparent protection of desk. Just play with pencil and colors. Perhaps someday I publish article about drawing such diagrams so anybody could do it for him/her-self on the computer.

Life goals in GTDtab

We do not underestimate power of motivation, therefore in version 0.1.3 of our online GTD appplication we added new feature to provide small motivation board everywhere where you can use GTDtab. It requires only few steps to complete:

1. If you do not have Context badge for Lifegoals, go into the tab Contexts, click on Create new context and fill the form. Name it Lifegoal, Goal, Objective or whatever else you want to. Try to use bright color scheme for your life goals context.
2. Create your life goals records as ordinary stuff. Click on Collect new thing and fill the form. Use short names for the goals, like Get married or PhD. Do not forget to click on context you have previously created. Save your new stuff.
3. Go to My account and click on Change settings. In the field Life goals choose Context you have created and in next select From all boxes except Archive.
4. After click on button Save settings you should see your goals in the left bottom corner of the page.

It is up to you to find out what happen when you click on life goal in Life goals cloud.