I am working again on my goals. I want to be focused and work on the most important things.

In this short post I will share some of the things I have been doing to get myself on the right track again.

What should I work on?

This is maybe the most difficult question, but once you get it figured out everything else becomes easier.

In the past I used following system with good results:

• What do I want to be true when I am 40?
• Great, what needs to happen than before I am 30?
• And what should I do this year?

Recently, I have been introduced by Andy to intermediate objective maps. They complement the system I’ve been using, by visualising it nicely. I’ve created small little tool for myself to make creation of intermediate objective maps easier.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

The best tip Andy gave me was to share my map with my peers and get feedback. I am going to implement this advice soon :)

As a bonus, few weeks back I was wondering how much time actually I have before I am 30, hence this little tool, the age calculator.

What should I work on this week?

To visualise what I am working on at the moment (and where my attention should be) I’ve started using recently virtual board provided by Trello.

At the moment my personal kanban board has following columns: “Thinking about”, “To do”, “Doing”, “Waiting / Tracking” and “Done”.

I am experimenting with the on-line tool for this, as it gives me a lot of flexibility. Trello has a good mobile client and nice web UI.

What should I work on next week?

During a normal week I have heaps of interesting thoughts. They are inspired by conversation I have, tweets & blogs I skim over, etc. It’s quite easy to move on and forget about them.

To avoid this, I am capturing all those little thoughts and ideas in my “Inbox” Evernote notebook. Every Saturday I go through my “Inbox” and I triage the notes. This gives me a chance to action some of them, or at least plan what to do next.

Evernote again is great for this, as it has easy to use mobile client that doesn’t get in the way. For triage, Evernote desktop client is efficient and enjoyable to work with.

Conclusion

Hope you are inspired to try some of these ideas out. What tools and techniques are you using to stay focused?