Here’s a way to achieve your life goals, track your progress, set milestones, and stay motivated! As you probably know, personal development is a continuous process that is very hard to measure. To monitor if you’re staying on track and raise your motivation you can use agile tools like an online kanban board. Harness the same solutions that work for top businesses to achieve your personal goals.
An online kanban board (like Kanbanery) can be used for just about anything, from tracking your latest initiative to creating a learning schedule, recording goals, and brainstorming ideas. Get inspired by these five personal development kanban boards.
1. Learn a new language
Have you ever signed up for an online course or started learning a new language, and then just forgot about it? Learning new things requires not only self-discipline but also good organizational skills. If you skip classes once, you risk of making a habit of skipping classes. Use a kanban tool to create your action plan. For example, learn Spanish in 100 days. On your online kanban board you can plan your activities and monitor your learning process.
How to do it?
For instance, each class that you take online (via Coursera, Udemy, Treehouse, whatever) is a project, while each lecture is a task. To have a clear action plan you can use the task description field to make notes about the lecture, or attach your lecture notes as file attachments. An online kanban board helps you work toward completing a class entirely instead of dropping out in the second week. It is a simple, visual way to coordinate and start scheduling your lessons.
If someone you know has similar resolutions or interests as you, you can set up a shared board. In this way you can motivate each other and share your experience and knowledge. You can also make your board public and share the URL with friends, which will make you more motivated to keep progressing toward your goals.
2. Read more
Whether you’re heading off to a beach vacation or hoping to make the most of quieter work weeks, you want to catch up on your reading. Sometimes you have no idea what to read. How many times has someone told you about a great book but you haven’t written down the title and then you forgot it? Or maybe you read something crucial for your work but when you want to look it up again, you don’t remember where you found it? If any of these situations sounds familiar to you, it’s time to change your reading habits and consider using a project management app.
How to do it?
It is very easy. Just create a simple project board “Reading”. It allows you to keep all of your books on one list. In this way you can easily come back to every book title without cudgeling your brain.To have a clear picture of your reading progress, you can name your columns To read one day, To read soon, Reading, and Read. In this way you will see your reading flow. By using different labels you can mark book categories like hobby, travel, work, self-development, etc. You can also invite your friends to view your reading list, and even let them add their book suggestions.
An online kanban tool like Kanbanery allows you to create similar lists for movies, travels or whatever comes to your mind 🙂
3. Achieve your life goals
Where do you see yourself in two years? What about five years from now? What are you doing to monitor the progress of your career or your personal development? With Kanbanery, you can list goals for all aspects of your life. Color-coded labels provide you with a bird’s eye view of your progress, so you can see in which areas you’re making progress and which goals are falling by the wayside. It can help you to stay motivated, move forward and focus on longer term personal goals.
How to do it?
Create a board with a list of goals. Track the progress using columns such as Goals, To achieve, In progress, Achieved. Use the card description to list details about the goal, where/when/how you may achieve it, links to relevant websites, etc. Some of your goals may require substantial planning or may incorporate multiple endeavors. Use subtasks to accurately plan every step toward realizing the goal.
4. Tick off your bucket list
If you are one of those people who has a long list of dreams you want to fulfill and life experiences you desire to experience before you die, you should create your bucket list. Or maybe, if you have it already on paper, you can rewrite it to your kanban board and track your progress.
How to do it?
Start from creating a new online kanban board called “Dreams” or “Bucket list”. Then write down a list of things you want to do before you die. For instance, one of the “tasks” might be to visit 50 countries. After moving your achievements to the “Done” column you will be proud and grateful to have had the opportunity to have accomplished it! Plan ahead the highlights of your life and then share them with your loved ones!
Visualization again becomes useful when you need to see your progress towards the goalposts. The kanban styled layout of Kanbanery cards is in itself a good way. On the cards, we can create checklists, due dates, assign tasks, add attachments, photos and write notes.
5. Tracking Workouts
How many times have you started going to the gym “regularly”? Or how many times have you decided to lose weight? Maybe you are are not satisfied with your progress or have a problem with scheduling trainings? To get better results, try to organize your workout plan with Kanbanery.
How to do it?
Create a kanban board with your training schedule for every week. It is a simple way to monitor your progress and take satisfaction in your accomplishments. To keep self-discipline you can add milestones such as run a half-marathon by the end of 2016. To make your online Kanban board clear mark your trainings with different labels. Feel free to invite friends to view or share your board. This visible accountability towards your training partners might be extremely motivating. If you are trying to lose weight, keep a weekly record of your weight in the comments along with what you’ve done each week. Seeing the numbers and their fluctuation over time can be just the motivation you need.
There are many ideas to use the online kanban board to help you spend your time the way you want to. Maybe you have inspiring boards you’d like to share with the Kanbanery community? Let us know in the comments below!
