How do you run your Goals in MLO?

[John . Smith]

Hello 

How do you run your Goals?

I confess that I haven't got a good control of my Goals...

- Do you make certain Projects into Goals? 

- Do you sometimes make a subtask within your Projects into a Goal?

(If so in your Goals view do you show the hierarchy or not?

- Do you tend to have Goals as separate specially created entities? 

- And if you have a weekly Goal that you set for say this week, what happens if you fail to hit it during the week in question? 

- Do you put Due Dates into your Goals so that you can see which goals are coming up?

   and if so, how do you create your views?

- On reflection , I'm not 100% sure what the point of "Weekly", "Monthly" and "Annual" goals, if you are going to put a Due Date in, in any case to report on them.  :^/

As you may have guessed my goals are a bit of a mess. 

J

[robisme (Olivier R)]

Hi,

I still share your wonders, even after several questions/answers on this forum.

(Its like Review, even with answers and ideas, I can not use it).

Now, I only use goal as an additional parameter in case I need to create a specific view.

My main minsunderstanding is that this parameter has/receive no influence with/from due date (which could start to interest me).

Olivier

[Christoph Zwerschke]

Am 22.10.2015 um 18:57 schrieb John . Smith:
> How do you run your Goals?
> I confess that I haven't got a good control of my Goals...

In MLO, you would create the goal either as a task or a project (if it
is a "completable" goal), or as a folder (if the goal it is not really
"completable", like "becoming a better father to my kids").

MLO does not have specific indicators to distinguish goals from mundane
tasks other than the hierarchy. The goals are usually the items at the
top level of your hierarchy, the sub-goals and tasks to achieve the
goals are at the lower levels. You might want to create special flags
for marking important goals.

When the term "goal" is used by the MLO, it really means a "timeframe"
(and it would have been better if they replaced the term "goal" with
"timeframe" throughout the program). The view "goals" is particularly
confusing, because it does not show only goals, but all tasks grouped by
their timeframes.

The purpose of the "week", "month" and "year" indicator is only to help
you in scheduling your tasks (all tasks, not only goals). Every evening
(or morning), you go through your tasks marked as goal for the week, and
mark those you want to complete the next day with a star (for "to be
done today"). During the weekly review you will look at all your tasks
marked as goals for "month" and change those that you intend to do the
next week to "week". During a monthly review you will look at all the
"year" goals and change those for the next month to "month". Also, a
weekly goal boosts the computed score, so it appears higher in the todo
list, and it is also marked with a red exclamation mark so it really
sticks out.

The timeframes of "week", "month" and "year" are tentative and not
absolute. You set absolute dates on tasks only if necessary, otherwise
you determine their order by importance and urgency only.

The urgency setting and the week/month/year setting are in fact
overlapping, and I think that is a design flaw, since it forces you to
enter redundant information, and makes it possible to enter
contradicting values (for instance a goal for month with a lower urgency
than another goal for year). Anyway, the urgency setting is useful for
the fine grained ordering, the timeframes are for the coarse scheduling
during the reviews.

You can also set "review" dates. This serves to re-evaluate the
timeframes you gave to your tasks at the given review dates, since your
priorities can change over time, and some tasks become irrelevant if you
just wait long enough. Depending on how "stable" you think a assessment
of the task is, the longer you can set its review interval. It is also
useful for those tasks that do not have any timeframe at all (the famous
"someday/maybe" list). At the review date you will have the chance to
decide whether a "someday/maybe" task should become concrete, within a
timeframe of year, month or week.

This is how I'm using MLO, in the hope this helps other users.

-- Chris

[robisme (Olivier R)]

Thank you Christoph for this relevant advice.

Olivier

[John . Smith]

Gads - a lot to digest. Interesting though. Thank you Christoph.

I don't know if it's just me but I would very much like to have a calendar view of Goals. It wouldn't even need to be a 'table' structure - one row one day would do me. Complete with Start Date and Due Date for the each Goal.

Is any such thing possible or planned?
And in the meanwhile is there any way to export goals into something more visually helpful?

J

P.S. As things stand, although I do find MLO great for handling details, I find it terrible for visualising the big picture/overview of what's going on in my life and making strategic plans.