Achieving Personal Goals

3. Audio downloads

The main point about downloading audio material is that it’s a great way to learn new goal setting techniques, listen to the success stories of others, and just generally keep the right kind of motivating, possibility-thinking messages in your head wherever you are. It’s too easy to pick up unproductive, negative thoughts and beliefs, and listening to good material on your iphone, ipod, mp3 player or in your car or truck is an easy way to resist that and it just makes good sense.

If you’re not used to downloading your favorite motivational lectures, books, etc. from Amazon’s MP3 site (Amazon MP3 downloads), I highly recommend it. Yes, I’m an iPhone user so you might think I would advocate iTunes, but their Digital Rights Management policy is a pain. Why be restricted, when I can download simple mp3 files for the same $0.99 (or less!) that I can play anywhere. Sorry iTunes, but you get no recommendation from me.

4. General “collection” software (free)

Evernote is a Windows application, also available on the web, that’s used to capture ideas, voice notes, web pages, pictures or just about anything else you want to store. It becomes a database for the activities of your life. Anything you want to capture, whether for work, business ideas ….. idea, note, web reference, picture, image or whatever else you choose to capture…. these are the things Evernote is intended for. A way to capture them so all your “stuff” is in one place.

For example, if you’re working on a presentation at work and you stumble onto a great article on the web, or you see a sign and you want to take a picture of it, or you just think of something you want to say – Evernote gives you a way to capture, tag and store all of them.

This recommendation is also particularly good if you’re in iPhone user, since they’ve got a really good iPhone app.

5. Flash cards for the iPhone

This one’s really limited to iPhone users, but worth mentioning. I get frustrated when I read a great article or a good book, and I realize the next day that I can’t remember a single thing from what I read. Isn’t that wasted time?

I’m not talking about pleasure reading, but about reading things that can help my business, this website, fitness tips or whatever. This led to the decision to memorize those key facts. Memorization/learning is basically about repetition. And how did you memorize facts in college? Flash cards!

There are some very good flash card application on the web, and I found 2 in particular I like that have apps for the iphone that are really good (and they are also free!). iFlipr and gFlash are both simple but exactly what I wanted. They are iPhone apps you can review on the web, but I use the iPhone app for each. This turns down time in an airport, waiting in the doctors office, etc. into productive time if you choose to.