Matthew Lang

Goal setting. How many different methods have you tried? Lots? So have I, and every time I tried to use them I failed to reach the goal. Inevitably when I focus on one goal, everything else suffers. A few years ago I tried freelancing at night, however after month I was flat out exhausted and I the time I had to spend with my family also suffered. At the time I focused on the goal without seeing the rest of the world.

Last year though I tried something different. I used compass points.

Compass points are Nicholas Bate's strategy for making sure that goals in each aspect of life are moving forward goals in life that are based on aspects of your life. We all have different aspects in life, but when people set goals, they tend to focus on a specific set of goals and forget everything else in life.

The compass points that Nicholas Bate uses are:

• Career
• Mind/Body
• Personal Finance
• Relationships
• Fun
• Contribution

Now before you jump in and start assigning next actions to each of these compass points, take a step back. Each of these compass points are different and therefore require a different plan. Maintaining a healthy diet and exercise is different to advancing your career. Being healthy means regular exercise and of course eating healthily, but advancing your career might involve a training course at a local college. Also, compass points are not independent of each other. Focusing on one compass point for too long will likely have a negative affect on the other five compass points.

I used these compass points last year and had some success with them. Obviously, there's things in life that affect your plans and goals, but last year I advanced my career and I had some success with getting my finances in order and I made some open source contributions. I didn't set goals for all the compass points, but it did keep me focused on trying to maintain a balance between all of them. I'm using the compass points again this year, but with more of a focus on achieving a goal with each of them.

Nicholas has full blog post and free download on using compass points, which I highly recommend you read.

I would fail at this as well.

via xkcd

via Pedal Consumption

A new bike to lust after.

via BikeRadar

I'm not the first person to realise this, but productivity apps don't work for me. I've tried countless apps and services but none of them seem to work for me. The recurring problem I have is that all of them require me to be online or have a digital device in my hand. I like my iPhone, but using a task manager app on my phone usually ends up becoming a chore that I could do without.

My latest experiment was using Wunderlist to track some projects I've been working on. I setup the necessary lists I needed and started working with them. However after a few weeks of using it I ended up with lists of stuff that I haven't looked at for a fortnight.

Maybe it's just me, but tools like Evernote, Things, Omnifocus, and Wunderlist and other apps that aim to make you more productive, inevitably become dumping grounds for ideas, todos and other stuff that I end up never reviewing or actioning.

So what works for me then?

Pen and paper seems to be the choice that I keep coming back too. It's simple, effective and cheap, but not in terms of price. In terms of focus. I never get distracted by the latest features of pen and paper. There aren't any. I just open, write and close.

There's a place for productivity apps in my workflow and that's when you are collaborating with others as part of a team. Seeing what tasks are yours and sharing information in a group of people working on a project together is essential to making progress. I've no arguments with using productivity apps in this context. Especially when that team isn't in the same physcial office as is the case with so many people who take advantage of telecommuting to their job.

However, for personal projects and products I'm working on and day to day stuff that life throws at you, I'll stick with the lo-fi option of pen and paper. It works for me and that's what matters.

The fixed gear bike. Two wheels. One gear. Brakes, optional. Simple really. And that's the reason why the fixed gear bike is loved by many cyclists. It's a simple bike. Amongst it's carbon fibre, multi-geared brethren, it looks out of place, but it has a special place in the hearts of many cyclists. It's a bike with a single function, it just lets you ride.

Now take a look at Pop, the text editor for iOS from Minimal Tools. A single page text editor that offers no settings, no file management facilities, no synchronising with Dropbox. In fact there aren't any features about it. All you can do is write something with it and then copy what you have written to the clipboard. Why the hell would you want to buy this app then when all editors for iOS do this?

Well Pop does one thing that no other editor I have does. It doesn't distract me. It doesn't have anything to distract me with. It just lets me write.

We need more products like Pop and fixed gear bikes. Simple things that do one thing really well. Simple products let you do what you really want to do without any distractions.

I watched Miguel Indurain as a kid. He is a legend in cycling. When I first started watching cycling, Indurain was already on three Tour wins with a fourth on it's way. I watched him take his next Tour title and I was hooked on the sport.

We didn't see the likes of another Indurain until Lance Armstrong came on the scene. After chalking up a succession of Tour wins, there was just no stopping him. There was an aura about him. He just looked like he belonged there. Now today, his credibility as a sportsman is in tatters, but Lance Armstrong isn't the only guilty party to disgrace the sport. His is obviously the most widely covered and most damaging to the sport due to the number of Tour wins he achieved in his career, but there are others.The last 15 years of cycling have seen an increase in the frequency of doping scandals that have been reported. Year after year, riders are accused of doping and what's surprising to me is that riders are still testing positive for banned substances. Enough is enough.

For me the sport has been dogged by too many years of scandals which in turn have led to rumours of corruption higher up in the sport. My love of road cycling is definitely over. As a Brit I should have been over the moon to see Bradley Wiggins on the top of the podium in the Tour last year, but I barely paid much attention to it.

Maybe in a few years, if the sport has really tidied up its image then I'll watch again. However, it's no more road cycling for me.

... with everyone's favourite mentor, Nicholas Bate.

Ultimately we need to get big, get niche or get out. There are no magic recipes for success. But staying specialist, staying niche is close. And becoming generalist and starting to sell on price alone to compete is a road to self-destruction.

— Build a better business 4 by Nicholas Bate

I've been trying to get back into using mind mapping on a daily basis again. I've used it a couple of times this week already. So far so good.The problem I have is that the largest notebook that I am using is a tad on the small side (think half of A4 size) and therefore I can only fit two levels of branches in a single mind map.

And that's the recurring problem I have with mind mapping. You need a big workspace to mind map effectively and that means nothing smaller than A4, but I tend to favour smaller notebooks as a daily scratchpad and dumping ground.

Which brings me to outlining. It's fit perfectly with the small notebooks I have and it although it's more linear than mind mapping, I can still organise stuff in a hierarchy much like mind maps do.

Which is better to use though?