From Where I Sit: “Joe’s Goals”: You Gotta Try It

What I’m Reading

Shelby Foote: The Civil War: A Narrative (3 Vol. Set)
If you like David McCullough (1776, John Adams, Truman, etc.), you will love this history of the Civil War. I could not put it down. As is the case of most history, the book is full of leadership lessons and insights.
Dr. Bob Rotella: Golf Is a Game of Confidence
From time to time, I enjoy reading books on golf psychology. This is one of the best I have read. It basically focuses on directing a golf ball like you direct any ball—you focus on where you want it to go!
Eugene O’Kelly: Chasing Daylight
A remarkable by the former CEO of KPMG. Diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer, O’Kelly figures out life only when he is faced with his own imminent death. Must reading!
Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I'm reading this now for our book club. I haven't read it since high school. It is an amazingly well-written book. It gives you a peak into pre-civil-war America.
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
We just read this book in our book club. I wanted to through it across the room after three chapters. But I stayed with it. I'm glad I did. It is an amazing novel with some powerful, redemptive themes.
Jeff Gomez: Print Is Dead: Books in our Digital Age
If you are in the publishing business, this book is must reading. Gomez explains why print is dying and why content providers need not fear—provided they don’t get too attached to the delivery mechanism. I found it to be very compelling.
Cliff Atkinson: Beyond Bullet Points:: Using Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007 to Creat Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire
This is the best book currently available on making compelling presentations. If you use PowerPoint (or Keynote, for that matter), this is must reading. It will make you stand out from the crowd and deliver a truly stellar performance. I cannot recommend it too highly.
Wallace Earle Stegner: Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)
This is one of the best novels I have ever read. It is an insightful story about the relationship between two couples over several decades. We read it in our book club, and it stimulated an amazing discussion.
John G. Miller: QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life
In this remarkably simple book, John Miller articulates the often missing incredient to developing high performance teams: accountability. I highly recommend this book.
David McCullough: John Adams
An amazing book. Absolutely spellbinding. This is a great book on leadership.

Favorite Quotes

“Every search begins with beginner’s luck. And every search ends with the victor’s being severely tested.”

–Paulo Coelho
“Multi-tasking is dead. It never worked and it never will. Intelligent people love to sing its praises because it gives them permission to avoid the much more challenging alternative: focusing on one thing.”

–Timothy Ferriss
“Fight as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong.”

–Karl Weick
“Anyone can count the seeds in a melon. It takes vision to count the melons in a seed.”

–Unknown
“Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. After you become a leader, success is about growing others.”

–Jack Welch
“This coffee falls into your stomach . . . sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

–Honore de Balzac
“You see, when there is danger, a good leader takes the front line. But when there is celebration, a good leader stays in the back room. If you want the cooperation of human beings around you, make them feel that they are important. And you do that by being humble.”

–Nelson Mandela
“Our job is not to figure out the how. The how will show up out of a commitment and belief in the what.”

–Jack Canfield
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s forthcoming attractions.”

–Albert Einstein
“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up in teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress whilst producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

–Gaius Petronius, AD 66
“Now if you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired.”

–George S. Patton, U.S. Army General, 1912 Olympian
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

–Wayne Gretzky, as quoted by Steve Jobs in his keynote speech at MacWorld 2007, San Francisco
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as quoted in Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick, p. 28

Thursday, January 04, 2007

“Joe’s Goals”: You Gotta Try It

Yesterday, on the Lifehacker Web site, I read a review of a great tool for tracking the kind of non-negotiable disciplines I discussed in a previous post. It’s called Joe’s goals.

It’s a Web-based goal-tracker that is super easy to use. I set-up my basic disciplines in about five minutes. (Click on the link below to see a larger image.)

The only problem I see with the application is that it is only good for tracking daily or weekly disciplines. You can’t track monthly, quarterly, or annual disciplines. Fortunately, almost all of my disciplines are daily or weekly.

Nevertheless, this is one of those simple, elegant solutions that does one thing extremely well. It’s definitely worth a look if you are a “goal nerd” like me.

Technorati Tags: daily, davidallen, disciplines, goalsetting, gtd, planning, todo

Posted on Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 05:06 AM in Goal Setting, Productivity | Permalink

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Comments

You might want to check the RSS output of your blog. The last few have been garbeled with all sorts of html-code. Looks good in IE, awfull in RSS Bandit.

Posted by: Kaisa | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 05:50 AM

Kalsa,

Can you forward what you are seeing to my e-mail address? I am getting the RSS feed myself via endo, and it looks fine. However, I'd like to fix it if possible.

Thanks,

Mike

Posted by: Michael Hyatt | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 05:53 AM

My wife discovered www.sparkpeople.com when we began losing weight last year. Using their tools has been the easiest way to track exercise and keep a diary of what I eat. I lost over 30 pounds in 2006 in large part to watching my progress on www.sparkpeople.com. They have a section where you can track other goals unrelated to health and fitness, but it is not as sharp as Joe's. If you have fitness or weight loss goal at the top of your 2007 resolutions, check it out.

Posted by: W. Mark Whitlock | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 01:20 PM

Love it. Simple and effective. Thanks for the recommendation.

Posted by: Jon Dale | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 10:29 PM

It looks great, but I need a management system for all the spread sheets I have to keep track of now.

I did pass it on to one of my friends who was talking about doing just what you proposed!

Posted by: Bonnie Calhoun | Friday, January 05, 2007 at 12:07 AM

Very cool. I also like the little badge I can put up on my blog that displays the little goal chart. Might keep me accountable.

Posted by: Michelle Pendergrass | Friday, January 05, 2007 at 08:46 PM

I have been looking for just this sort of thing. Thanks for posting it. Great blog by the way.

Posted by: KIP | Monday, January 08, 2007 at 01:09 PM

What kind of books do you publish. I'm working on a book about marketing.

Posted by: Robert | Thursday, March 01, 2007 at 11:27 AM

You can check out our Web site here: http://www.thomasnelson.com.

Thanks.

Posted by: Michael Hyatt | Thursday, March 01, 2007 at 01:49 PM

I've tried this one and some and some others, but the one which really impressed me was Goal Enforcer,
www.goalenforcer.com
it's a real goal tracker, including achievement plot, status report and some cool color coded features.

Posted by: Steve | Friday, March 02, 2007 at 05:59 PM

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