You have big goals you’d like to achieve. But many of these goals have been on your list for the past few years.

If you’re so smart, why can’t you accomplish your goals? You’re smart, passionate and hard-working. But some days, you realize you did nothing towards your important goals.

What does it really take to achieve your goals? If it’s not brains, passion and hard work, what is it?

An 18-minute habit for getting important things done

Check out “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done” by Peter Bregman.

It’s a pragmatic and entertaining book that can help you focus on what’s truly important, by practicing a simple 18-minute habit:

• Step 1 (5 Minutes) Set Plan for Day. Before turning on your computer, write down a short list of things you will do towards your big goals. Schedule these into your calendar, with the most important items in the morning.
• Step 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus. Set an alarm to ring every hour. When it rings, ask yourself if you spent the last hour working on the items you wrote down in step 1. Were you productive? If not, recommit to winning during the next hour. Repeat this exercise every hour until the end of the work day. (disclosure, I’ve found that an alrm going off every hour creates more stress than it’s worth, so I checkin and refocus every 3 hours).
• Step 3 (5 minutes) Review. And the end the day, take time to review how you did. How did you find your focus? Where did you get distracted? How can you be more productive tomorrow?

Imagine feeling more happy and productive!

Rituals like the one described above make big changes in our lives because they change how we go about changing.

If you practice this 18-minute habit, I mean actually do it, you’ll get more done AND feel happier and more productive at the end of each day.

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If you’re like the participants in a recent Harvard study, you work during vacation. You may even skip vacation like the 35% who work over 50 hours a week.

The thing is, we’re not machines. We’re animals. And like most animals, we need to rest, unplug, and reset.

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Change the way you document the world with this smart little app

Guest post by Janet Fouts
Social Media Coach

Productivity software? I’ve tried it. It seems to never do what I need it to do, and I spend more time setting it up and loading stuff into it than I do actually using it. Most of the apps I’d tried also had accessibility issues. Sometimes they synced, sometimes they didn’t, and I was constantly maintaining the tool that was supposed to make my life easier.

Until now. In a blog post I came upon, marketing ace Steve Rubel made a casual remark about a product called Evernote. This, my friends, is a very cool app.

In a nutshell, Evernote lets you add information to a database that is accessible through the Web, a desktop app, and your iPhone, Blackberry or smartphone. Items are tag-able and fully searchable so you can add pretty much anything, run a search, and quickly find it again wherever you are.

Let Evernote serve as your memory

Now when I say you can upload things, try to visualize this. You’re at a networking event and you suck at remembering names. With Evernote you can take a picture of a person with your phone, tag them with their name and they’re saved for future reference in your database. Even more interesting, include their name badge in the snapshot, even a handwritten name tag, and Evernote will recognize the handwriting and enter it as searchable text! Whoa!

Evernote can find text within images, recognize it and make the text searchable. The image at top is a snapshot I took of the bag given out at N2Y4 Mobile Challenge. The highlighted yellow text is the result of a search for the words “Mobile Challenge” in my Evernote database. I hadn’t even tagged it yet. I also found my notes from Raj Singh’s lecture, the images of the slides he put up, the website homepage with session info, and a reminder to connect with one of the people I met at that talk.

Never again will I collect a bunch of paper at trade shows just to remember the product offering. A few quick photos of the booth, and not only do I have faces to relate to later, but the booth itself, logos, products and the text of the brochures ready to use in my post. all in one swoop. This is going to make blogging after conferences a breeze.

Other nifty features

Evernote does more.

• You can clip a snippet of a web page or the whole thing, screen shots, emails. downloaded PDFs, scanned receipts or even business cards are recognized, tagged and filed.
• Record an audio message to listen to later, take a photo and tag the two to record an event or item to remember.
• Drag and drop content like a PDF right into Evernote from your desktop and it’s filed (and searchable).
• You can even save your precious Twitter Tweets (public or DM) directly into Evernotes database by simply including @myEN in the message (quick set up required)

Evernote constantly syncs with the database, so you are only seconds away from totally available information.

Did I mention it’s free? Yes, you have to put up with some small rotating banner ads, but believe me it’s worth it. Odds are very good you’ll upgrade to premium anyway, not to get rid of the ads, but to get more storage (up to 500MB added per month). For $45/year it’s a steal, trust me.

Are you using Evernote too? share some tips and tricks, I’m just getting started here. Got an even better app? Tell me, I love finding new toys!

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