Why I’m writing this
One of the reasons why I’ve been concentrating so much on goals and personal ‘stuff’ the past year or two has been because of life changes and my reaction to them. I’ve always been a contemplative, philosophical person, but the death of my mother shook me badly, not only for the loss and grief I felt, but for triggering in me the need to do an inventory of what I want to do in my life. Because I had always had my mum around to work on these things, I had a trusted friend to talk about them with; now that she’s gone, I realized that I’ve done enough talking and wishing, and need to achieve them. My mum, ever the practical realist (being a nurse helps at that) would want me to keep on keeping on, and actually do them.
So here’s what I’m doing.
I‘ve a productivity, organizing and personal development addict – I admit it, reading about this stuff really intrigues me. Part of the problem is that there don’t seem to be enough tools to help me with my life plan of what I want to do. I have a personal wiki over on WetPaint that I love and it helps me keep organized – although with no mobile app, it’s a bit of a hassle to interact with. There are other stand alone tools or sites like 43 Things which I’ve used, but they’re limited. What I can share with you is what I’ve done so far for the formatting of it, and if you have ideas of what works for you, share ’em. Necotelcugen Once I’ve finished organizing them, I’ll post it to my blog to continue that accountability – and because as much as I like 43Things, I like long form tools more.
On my personal wiki, I’ve created the Master Page (the index/default home of the wiki). I’ll walk you through each of the major parts of it.
1. Wetpaint interface
A nice feature of the Wetpaint site is the ability to customize the look and feel of the interface. Ever a fan of anything Mod, this one suits me right now.
2. Wetpaint features
Wetpaint has lots of handy social features, although I don’t use them as much since I’m using Wet Paint as a private wiki). WetPaint lets you create fairly rich HTML pages with a standard editor; you can’t stylize it too much, but the ability to add tables and standard text formatting options is nice.
3. Site organization
This is the secondary nav in WetPaint; this allows me to have sub sections and the sub pages underneath them.
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The actual goals are broken down by area – emotional, intellectual, physical, spiritual. Each of these sections has a separate page (and sometimes, sub pages). I’m also including each of these areas to ensure that I strive for some balance in my life – not to be completely in one house, as it were.
4. Administration section
Every page has a ‘to do’ section to remind me of what I need to finish the page. I could use a note
or discussion feature, but sticking this onto the top of every page makes sure I get it done so I don’t miss it.
5. List of Goals
Ah, what you’ve been waiting for. Here’s the goods on the goods:
- Goals: Each goal has or will have a separate page (hyperlinked) describing the goal in detail, links and reference material. This helps ensure this home page listing with ALL the goals remains fairly small to print out.
Priority: If it hasn’t got a priority, it won’t get done. On the sub pages I’ll go more into the timely details (the ‘status’ column).- SMARTness: It’s an old standard, but it works. Before I commit to a goal, I need to detail it a bit to ensure I can achieve it. Just in case you odn’t
- Specific – who’s involved, what I want to do, when, where and why done, why I want to do it
- Measurable – concrete criteria/metrics for measuring progress (i.e. how much? how will I know when it’s done?)
- Attainable – when you identify goals, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true
- Realistic – an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work
- Timely – grounded within a time frame
The future of this plan
I don’t spend hours each day working on this ‘Life Plan’, but having it down in this kind of format helps me keep organized. I don’t obsessively add everything in my life onto this plan, but having a plan is the first step towards achieving it. I think a lot about the tools of how we plan our lives and what we can do to achieve them. webhosting info . At some point I’d like to build my own app for this, since there doesn’t seem to be the Perfect Killer App with this. In the mean time, I’ll have to just add it to my list of Things I Want To Do in my plan – and it’s far handier to have the plan than to have nothing to use for it. In a future post, I’ll share some of the actual goals, both personal and professional.
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