Agile Personal Development

One of the last methods I’m evaluating for developing a list of lifetime goals (at least in this iteration) is using a list of questions to help you think of lifetime goals. The questions I’m using come from a Success Begins Today blog post.

The first thing I did was change the font on the lifetime goals document, it was hard for me to read and was distracting me. I then started reading through the questions, and really thinking about each one. Many of them are similar in wording (e.g. what do you want to do, what do you want to accomplish), so I had to interpret the wording changes and how it impacted my answers.

One major difference with this method over some of the other methods I evaluated is that you start with a clean sheet of paper. No ideas from other people to look at. Just a big blank space staring you in the face. Having already developed a number of goals through the other methods was helpful at this point, since I didn’t feel enormous pressure that these were the only goals I would have.

I found this exercise to be fairly challenging, it really made me think. I also noticed that on the ‘people’ related items (e.g. who do you want to eat dinner with, who do you want to meet, etc.) I drew a blank. I’m not sure if this is just a personality trait of mine (I don’t get excited by the idea of meeting someone specific), or that I have never really thought about it before. Frankly, most of the people I would want to meet are from the past (Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc.).

In some categories (things you want to accomplish, things you want to do), I had to go beyond the “Top 5″ list and add a few more. After brainstorming, I ended up with 40+ goals. Many of them were the same as I had generated using other methods (hey - I got desperate looking at the blank screen, I had to put something in!).

Overall, this method was pretty good for a ‘clean sheet of paper’ method. I found it easier to choose existing goals using other methods, but this method really made me think about my own personal goals and interests. Just like I learned in other life list brainstorming methods, there are some things that aren’t for me (choosing specific job titles, people to work for), while there are other categories that I can add to forever (mainly things to accomplish and places to see).

My final evaluation of the Success Begins Today Lifetime Goals method will be in a future post.

The next method for developing a life list is the My50 website. They focus on developing 50 goals to accomplish in your lifetime. It is very similar to SuperViva and Life Tango in that you can add your list on-line, look at other people’s lists for inspiration, and set the timing of when you want to accomplish your goals.

First, I set up an account, pretty easy to do. Next I went to the 50 suggestions section to get ideas. This section gives you 50 popular ideas to give you a starting point for your life list. What I really liked about the 50 suggestions was the paragraph or two describing each one, plus some details about why they like the goal. Adding a goal to your list is super easy, just click the link and it’s done. They also have links to more information about each goal, with more ideas. Although this site is based in the UK, you can still get ideas if you happen to live elsewhere, the ideas just won’t be as specific to your geographic area.

After going through their 50 suggestions, I ended up with 25 goals, and 14 achievements. I think that shows that the 50 standard suggestions are good ones, ones that almost anyone will find some good ideas from. Some are generic in nature (See what’s happening in your community, be creative, take photos of your family and friends), others are specific (visit Paris, ride a rollercoaster, sleep under the stars).

The next step was to go to the Ideas section to find some more goals. This section is broken out into 9 individual categories (Activities and Sport, Flying and Driving, Creative and Entertainment, Health and Relaxation, Travel and Holidays (Vacations for me), Making or Saving Money, Relationships and Spiritual, Getting Back to Nature, and Education and Learning. Within each category, there are about 30 goals to choose from. After going through the different goals, I ended up with 67 goals, and 11 achievements.

I then tried looking up other people’s lists to get more ideas. This wasn’t that easy to do. You basically need to type in a keyword and it will pull up different people’s lists. What I need to come up with for the future is a list of keywords that I could use. I got stuck trying to find out what I should type in.

Next I went to the Places to Visit tab. This basically allows you to drill down on different continents, then countries, then regions, then cities. I think this would be more useful if you were trying to find specific cities to visit.

Overall, this was a pretty good site for coming up with ideas for your life list. I didn’t stick to the 50 goal suggested limit, but hey, I’m an overachiever, what do you expect?

You can see my “My50″ list here.

Another site that looked like a great way to develop a life list is Life Tango. This post will walk you through my experience with the site. For now, I’m not going to reference my SuperViva life list that I recently created.

I went straight to the Brainstorming Wizard to kick things off. Honestly, this part wasn’t that helpful for me. It consisted of two questions per category (Travel, Education, Career, Financial, Family, Health, and Spiritual), like “Where would you like to go on vacation?” or”What’s the one thing you want to do with your family?”. It didn’t really inspire me. I guess I was expecting more choices or different questions. I ended up with 7 goals, none of them really interesting. This method might be more useful for someone who hasn’t really thought about life goals before.
Next I went through the Learn More tab, where they suggested I refine my goals using the SMART method (this involves making sure each goal is Specific, Measurable, Admirable, Realistic, and Time-based. I’m a big believer in using the SMART method for goal creation, so was happy to see it. However, I didn’t see much value in working on my seven goals since I ended up with better ones using the SuperViva method. Next I checked out the Community tab, hoping to find some good goals from others that would inspire me. The 10 most popular goals were a little weren’t that relevant to me (two of them had to do with drinking more water). I decided to dig into goals by specific category. I started off with the Arts and Entertainment category. What was annoying about this feature was that the same goal is repeated throughout, every time a user has it. For some reason, A LOT of people are interested in writing a novel and going glow bowling. It was also hard to read, since there was a lot of white space between the goals. I didn’t find any that really inspired me.

I went to the Business and Career category next. About halfway through, I gave up. Nothing was really interesting to me. I decided to try the Travel category as one last ditch effort for inspiration. I did find one goal, ‘Vacation in Australia’, that I liked. In order to add this goal to my own list, I had to click through two or three screens. This was a lot harder than on SuperViva, where you just clicked the ‘Add this Goal’ button next to the goal, and it automatically did it. Again, having to see the same goal repeated over and over again with every person that had adopted it was annoying. Also, because of the way the brainstorm questions are worded, many of the goals are just single words, like ‘Japan’, or ‘Europe’. Taken on its own, it is hard to understand exactly what the goal is - backpack through Europe, visit the Eiffel Tower, learn a European language?

At this point, I realized that this site wasn’t going to do it for me. SuperViva was significantly better at helping me brainstorm and select ideas, and the features for tracking goals seemed at least as good as at Life Tango. I’ll post a final evaluation shortly.