Tools To Help You Stay Organized & Achieve Your Goals
Every goal should be achievable if supported by the right system. You need to have a value adding supporting system in place that allows you to track your progress, hit your milestones and each day bring your goal closer into focus.
Published on January 03, 2021 by Tony E.
2 min READ
Every goal should be achievable if supported by the right system. You need to have a value adding supporting system in place that allows you to track your progress, hit your milestones and each day bring your goal closer into focus.
Focus on systems, not on goals.
There are lots of tools available out there (as I have found) specifically designed to tracking tasks and settings goals. Find the right one for you and go for it!
My Goals
On Dec. 31, 2020 I set some lofty goals for 2021:
- I want to grow the NetworkCollective podcast.
- I want to continue to develop and grow the NetworkCollective Live Stream
- I want to speak at 2 conferences.
- I want DevNet Assoc.
- I want GIAC: NFA
- I want GIAC: CIA
- I want to move my email off of Gmail.
- I want to read a few books (fiction/non-fiction/study/certification/tech)
By Jan 2nd 2021, I started on my DevNet Assoc. journey and found myself realizing this is a real certification and not something I can just commit the bare minimum hoping to get lucky. I realized I need to make a plan, a real plan. A plan with milestones and timekeeping, tracking resources and more. Since completing my CCIE almost a year ago I haven’t needed to build a plan like this and admittedly I was out of practice on how to learn.
On Twitter, I asked this simple question:
The responses were so numerous I wanted to aggregate them here. I’m also scoring them, in brackets, based on the number of responses I got about them.
- Todoist [10]
- Notion [8]
- Trello [7]
- Google Keep [3]
- Asana [2]
- Clickup [2]
- Kanban Tool [2]
- Things3 from CulturedCode (for Apple products ONLY) [2]
- Microsoft ToDo (Microsoft Office365 Offering) [2]
- Microsoft Project (Microsoft Office365 Offering) [1]
- Microsoft Planner (Microsoft Office365 Offering) [1]
- Jira from Atlassian [1]
- Paymo [1]
- Coschedule [1]
- Goalscape [1]
- Nozbe [1]
- GitLab/GitHub Project KanBan boards [1]
As I work through and test some of these tools while studying for my certifications, I’ll write some reviews here or you can always be sure I’ll be sharing any-and-all tips via Tiwtter.
Next Steps
Nick Russo has put together a study plan for Devasc that has helped many prepare for the exam. I will be primarily using this along with the DevNet training/certification bundle I purchased. I would like to complete this journey by the cut-off for DevNet class of 2020 but it’s not mandatory, I just prefer hard deadlines to drive schedules.