That’s An Idea: Goal Setting With A Wonder Pen

Sparkplugging is starting a new tradition called ‘Spark an Idea Thursday’. Each week we’ll be sharing some great ideas for a topic of interest to our readers. We invite you to grab our image and carry the tradition through to your own blog! If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

This week we’re Sparking an Idea that about Goal Setting

Getting real here. I’m not the type to set small goals. Mine tend to be lofty, sky high, grandiose – hey after all, you’re talking to a Sagittarius. You know, the archer and all that stuff.

I wouldn’t say it hasn’t served me well. Big lofty, grand plans works well for my style. I look at my goals as a big long process out of which many smaller steps need to happen first. Like a journey.

Mindmap courtesy Wikipedia

When I was 15, my mom sent me to an expensive 3 day seminar that taught me how to plan, learn and achieve my goals using mind mapping techniques. I can’t recall if the seminar produced results right away – poor mom BUT I can safely tell her that she had spent her money well. That’s the way I do my goal setting and planning now. Not exactly the way that was taught, I’ve adapted and combined it with yet another popular system you may have heard of – Getting Things Done.

To help me implement and visualize my goals, believe it or not, the humble pencil (or pen or marker) and index card works the best for me but that may be changing rapidly. You see, while cards, maps and charts are awesome, I’ve been spoiled by the Internet. I can’t search them. Not having the best memory around, search is like the ultimate tool for me. How nice if I can go back and search my mind maps.

A few months ago, I invested in a Pulse Smartpen also known as the Livescribe pen and just like that. Just like that, now all my maps can be digitized, cataloged aaannnndddd… searched! Yes!

There’s more of course. It can record audios and ‘link’ them to your notes. You can even share the maps and audios live online. Great tool to outline an idea, explain tasks or communicate your goals to remote staff. Check out some of the stuff others have shared (you can make it private).

Some have even gone as far as creating their own ‘Pen casts’ like a podcast + drawing + writing. That’s pretty neat and think I’ll create some Pen-casts to experiment in upcoming information products or membership sites.

There are some annoying things with the pen though. For example, I cannot delete pages once it’s uploaded to the computer. I also wished it allowed me to add more information to archived notebooks. Overall I really like it.

My kids love it too. They call it “The pen that talks” and love the piano feature – uhuh, you can play a simple piano on it. All you have to do is draw the piano and start playing.