Making a concerted effort to follow through with personal goals and aspirations may feel as challenging as carrying the One Ring to Mount Mordor, or any other epic fantasy (you chose). Yet with steady effort, mountains can be traversed, dragons slain, and friends made on the way to reaching your journey’s end. In the words of Bilbo, “There and back again.”
Dragons and Other Real Myths
Fantasy games and books often feature simplified maps of the land they are set in. These maps highlight major landmarks that will eventually be journeyed through on the way to the protagonist’s destination.
Your goal can be thought of in terms of a map, one with little detail at the outset, that you will have to complete as you make your journey.
Map making is something you must learn to do over time, keeping track of where you are going, where you have been, your struggles and how you overcame them.
Imagine being faced with the choice to journey across the top of a stormy snowy peak, or go through the heart of a mountain, through unknown tunnels and caverns. Even without any fantastic creatures to battle, your journey would be fraught with difficult decisions, the need to backtrack, times of exhaustion and worry, and uncertainty.
Alongside decisions about the journey, you will have to face on-going challenges that feel more like battles with dragons or giant spiders (insert your own personal monsters).
Chose wisely, will the energy and risk help you towards your goal?
Journeying through cavernous mountains, or over blizzard-white peaks, while fighting your personal battles, has to be done day-by-day, step-by-step, even when exhausted.
In other words, achieving your goal, your aspiration, is not going to be easy (otherwise you would have done it already).
Without perseverance one outcome is certain. Like the bulrog in The Lord of the Rings, “you shall not pass!”
Finish Line
There is an abundance of material on Productivity and related techniques, exhortation to discipline and stoicism. Yet (at least from what YouTube shows me) not that much on focus.
Focus means keeping your eyes fixed on the finish-line, and being single minded about reaching it. Except this is not a 100 meter dash but a journey that takes, what feels like, forever.
To keep focussing throughout the chaos of daily life, you need to position your aspiration, with motivation, benefits and costs in front of you every week and every day. Then keep asking the question
What can I do today to step towards my goal?
Second Brain
Over the years I have tried quite a few productivity tools, but none of them were quite what I needed.
- Task-based tools are great for tracking actions, but I found tracking who was doing what when and detailing the outcome lacking.
- Note taking tools are easy to use, but information could not easily be linked to tasks and people.
Obsidian is the tool I am currently using (for about 2 years now). At its’ heart it is an un-opinionated text editor that works with locally stored markdown files. However Obsidian has a large, and growing, collection of plugins produced by the community, which have added an abundance of features.
I use Obsidian to note, categorise, link/connect and report on:
- Life goals
- People, places, organisations along with calls, discussions, and meetings
- Projects, and progress of tasks
- Notes on anything — topics of interest, related to tasks, etc.
- Daily and weekly planning along with reminders and daily notes
- Quick notes — items that need to be noted down and can be deleted once acted on
- Writing fiction and non-fiction (including drafting this article)
The toolset you use is less important than the results, so don’t feel the need to change unless your tools are not good enough.
A ‘second-brain’ helps your ‘first-brain’ recall information, find links between things, and ultimately create new works.
Focussing on Your Goal
When I open Obsidian I get a reminder of my most important aspiration:
- Goal headline
- Brief description
- Motivation
At the moment, my Obsidian ‘home page’ looks something like this (I say ‘at the moment’ because I tend to make regular revisions):
On the right, I placed a simple flow diagram that peels off the next layer of my goal (Financial Freedom) by asking “what?”, “how?” and “why?” several times:
With this in place, each morning I can start by asking myself a key question:
What will I do today to move towards my goal?
In time you can become intentional about your use of time, assessing the value of each task by considering the short-term, mid-term and long-term
- benefit if I do it now?
- cost if I do not do it now?
Use questions like these (and others as you come across them) to climb out of the pit of panic, just acting on urgent crises, freeing yourself to work on what is important.
Small Steps
I grew up in an era when neurodivergence was unheard of. My mum called me scatterbrained, and suggested I would forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on. Joking aside, there are dangers to ignoring our own mental-wiring, just as there is the danger of drowning in self-pity if we just see ourselves as ‘different’.
Each of us has a range of strengths and weaknesses. A healthy community of trusted friends can help overcome struggles, with the differing strengths of each complementing and supporting.
Yet at some point, we each need to battle our own particular dragons.
I am using the suggestions I have made in this article to help me anchor my scattered thoughts. Obsidian works for me because I only have to look in one place for just about anything I want to note down (I tend to forget where I noted something, or even if I noted it, so I need a single, personal ‘source of truth’.
I still have to chose to write down anything I can, whenever I can, because notes do not create themselves, just as goals do not achieve themselves. No-one else can do this for me. Hence a key lead-measure towards success for me is consistent use of Obsidian. To facilitate this I have it on my phone, iPad and Mac.
Sometimes succeeding means taking small steps on a moment-by-moment basis. A cadence of daily reviews (start and end of day, and maybe in the middle) keeps your goal, and all your other daily obligations, in focus and helps you become intentioned as you journey through this year.
It is time to be accountable to yourself — this is your 2025!