| This year I've been using Complice.co which is interesting because it focuses on the present and the past but doesn't have any features for planning the future. (I'm friendly with the Complice team on Twitter, because they're cool people, but I'm not a shill!) Every working day, I start with putting today's intentions into Complice, and then I work with the builtin Pomodoro timer. Intentions are structured by a small set of "goals" or "areas." I have four which I call Wellness, World, Research, and Workshop; every intention belongs to one of those, or misc. I have a small set of basic daily intentions set up, which includes one I call "settle" which means looking through my inbox and my todo list for actionable items I can do without much thinking, and also replying to messages and stuff like that. So I aim to spend one Pomodoro session there, and the goal is to feel like I've "settled" my basic relation to the world. That kind of thing was always hard for me to keep up with, and my current success is due to Complice and also getting an ADHD diagnosis with medication late last year, which has helped me transform my life in a major way. I have a separate system for todos, namely Things for iOS/Mac, where I put future intentions that I want to remember. During the "settle" session, I look at that list, and decide which of the todos I might want to do today, and make them into intentions. The other cool thing about Complice is that it has weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews. So for example it's Monday morning now, so my next task (after my coffee and internet) is to go through the weekly review form, which shows me an overview of the past week, along with the previous weekly review, and asks me some customizable questions about how it's going for each area of my life. Getting diagnosed also encouraged me to start the year by participating in Complice's "online goal-crafting workshop" which was fun and interesting. That's the first time I've ever really thought consciously about setting goals for myself! One insight that I had about goals is that for them to really function as goals, for me, they need to be what I call "visible on the horizon." That basically means I can IMAGINE them, and when I imagine them I feel GOOD, the picture evoked is one that's nice and positive, so that my whole body can orient itself towards it. |