Your End of Year Review: Goal Setting and Time Management

December 27, 2008 by Tom Colvin
Filed under: 1-Finding Time, 3-Miscellaneous Topics, Uncategorized 
Microsoft Office Outlook
Image via Wikipedia

Are you like me at this time of year?  Do you drift into a reflective mood, thinking back over the past year and beginning to noddle around with ideas for the coming year?  If so, here are some ideas and tools for goal setting and time management.

I’ve stumbled onto an interlinked bundle of websites and computer programs put together by Brian Isaac.  I was pulled into one of his sites that offers a free time management tool that hooks directly into Microsoft Outlook:  TaskBlaze.  But more about that later…

I followed Brian’s trail of links on to his goal setting website, which offers an interesting software called Achieve-IT.  This site is one of those hard-sell pages that tries to entice you into an immediate purchase.  While such pages often irritate me, I still find them fascinating — and frequently I read through the formulaic copy to see just what I can learn.  Brian’s site, for example, offers an 18-minute demo video about some of the features of his software package.  If you are reflecting about your future goals right now, then I really recommend that you look at the video.  It won’t cost you a thing, and Brian presents a slant on goal setting that I found invigorating.  He encourages you to brainstorm your goals for the next year.  Next do the same for your goals over the next five years.  Then 10 years.  And finally what goals you want to accomplish over your lifetime.  I’ve never myself really looked beyond a five-year time frame.  Looking farther out can be a provocative exercise; it can clarify a lot about just who you are and what your real ultimate values are.  Just watching the video stirs ideas — and at $39.95, the program may be worth a purchase.

Now back to Brian’s TaskBlaze software that helps one track the time you put into your various tasks.  I’ve written a number of posts about time tracking tools.  This one is particularly ingenious because it reports your time use directly into Microsoft Outlook.  If you are an Outlook user, this software deserves a look.

There seem to be two different versions, free and pro.  So far, I haven’t been able to discover how they differ — and since I don’t use Outlook, I can’t really evaluate them.  I suspect Brian does not update the free version, but does so with the Pro version.  If you do use Outlook yourself, you can find the free version of TaskBlaze here.   The Pro version can be found, along with Brian’s informative sales pitch, at the software’s dedicated website TaskBlaze.  Right at the moment, the Pro version is available at a discounted price of $19.

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