I would like to draw your attention to this new book - Goal Free Living by Steve Shapiro.

Than main idea, as I understood, is that not all people can be goal-oriented. Many people can't motivate themselves by the goals of our achievement-oriented society.

Steve said:

"I've done a number of surveys on the relationship between people's goals and their happiness. What I've found is that most people keep sacrificing "today" for "tomorrow." They'll set a goal, plan it out, work hard, achieve the goal, and then say, "Okay, that was great; what's next?" They're constantly striving to achieve these goals in the belief that life's going to get better."

Maybe, such point of view also can be useful. For me life is great as a process, including the process of goal achievement. But if you have problems with being happy in this process - you should review the necessity of your goals.

This blog is running by authors of Mind Pad  (www.mind-pad.com)

I promised to write about creating mind map for revision situation with your current projects. Creating a list of your current projects also corresponds to Getting Things Done (The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen) method. You can read more about GTD here. And here is the blog of its author, David Allen.
This post is about creating the list of your current projects. With these projects you ended last year and begin the new 2006 year.
Steps are very simple:
1. Main topic of your map: "Projects list".
2. Next level topics are the names of your projects. Remember, "project" is any problem or task which requires more than 2 steps to solve it. Be careful and try to recall all your projects. Don't hurry, because usefulness of this map directly proportional to its completeness. After filling your list go to the step 3.
3. Now you should review each projects and answer for the following questions. Each question - is a subtopic under the topic of the project. If you have more than one answer - you should create branches for this subtopic.

Questions:
 - What is the end result of the project?
 - What problems could appears during this project?
 - How many ways do you know to execute this project? (Each way is a branch)
 - What you can do with all this right now?

4. As the result, you will have a simple view of your current situation.

I advise you to list your "right now actions" (last question) on the peace of paper and to follow this list.
To make it all work you should regularly review your map with projects.

This blog is running by authors of Mind Pad  (www.mind-pad.com)