Mario Andretti once said,

Desire is the key to moti­va­tion, but it’s deter­mi­na­tion and com­mit­ment to an unre­lent­ing pur­suit of your goal — a com­mit­ment to excel­lence — that will enable you to attain the suc­cess you seek.

Desire to attain a goal is key — but how do you make the com­mit­ment to achieve your goals? How do you con­trol the activ­i­ties and the infor­ma­tion that’s related to your goals? How do you mas­ter the tools? At LightAr­row, we under­stand that all the things you want to man­age to achieve your goals can be very com­plex, and you can’t man­age every­thing in a sim­ple to-do list. Com­mit­ting to using a sys­tem­atic approach to pro­duc­tiv­ity can reduce your feel­ings of being over­whelmed, stressed, or out of con­trol. Keep­ing your com­mit­ment to per­sonal orga­ni­za­tion can help you live a hap­pier and health­ier life.

We’ve devel­oped our app, Life­Topix, to assist you in mas­ter­ing the art and sci­ence of per­sonal orga­ni­za­tion. It man­ages all the infor­ma­tion in your life — EVERYTHING — so you can get things done your own way in one place. Our app is based on the fol­low­ing: Cap­ture, Know, Track, Con­nect, and Act.

Cap­ture

Accord­ing to David Allen, who is a pro­duc­tiv­ity con­sul­tant and the cre­ator of the time man­age­ment method known as “Get­ting Things Done” or GTD, the first step to get­ting things in con­trol is to

cap­ture into a sim­ple ‘bucket’ all of those things that are not on cruise control—anything that has your attention.

Life­Topix lets you cap­ture all of those things quickly by using Quick Add from the My Top­ics panel (your Life­Topix home base). You can cap­ture Tasks, Notes, Appoint­ments, Reminders, Book­marks, Files, Audio, Pho­tos, Videos, Check­lists, Expenses, Projects, Events, Trips, Vis­i­tors, Ser­vice Providers, Assets, Log Forms, Activ­i­ties, Nutri­tion, Health Stats, Med­ica­tion, and Well­ness items. You don’t need to cap­ture all of these items or act on them right away, and they can be parked until you are ready to deal with them.

Know

Once you’ve cap­tured all those things, the chal­lenge is know­ing what to do with them. View­ing those items in a high-level view, such as a cal­en­dar or project view helps you to under­stand the scope. It’s impor­tant to pri­or­i­tize your tasks — pay­ing atten­tion to the impor­tant things and set­ting aside the not so impor­tant things. Pri­or­i­tiz­ing tasks by High, Medium, and Low makes sure you com­plete the high­est pri­or­ity tasks first. And per­haps some of the lower pri­or­ity items can go into your “to-don’t” list if you don’t have the time to fin­ish them.

For exam­ple, maybe your goal is to declut­ter your house so you decide to par­tic­i­pate in a neigh­bor­hood garage sale. There’s lots of tasks that need to be com­pleted in order to make sure your garage sale project is a suc­cess. View­ing those tasks in a Project View with pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of tasks can help you see the big pic­ture and under­stand if this endeavor is man­age­able within your schedule.

Project View

View­ing those tasks in a Cal­en­dar View shows you what’s next so you can act on the tasks appropriately.

Cal­en­dar View

Track

At the end of your day do you ever ask your­self, “where did the day go?” Do you feel that you were busy all day, yet you accom­plished noth­ing? Does your spouse, part­ner, or man­ager ever ques­tion why you didn’t accom­plish a task and you tell them that you just did not have time? Are they are skeptical?

If you want to achieve your career, per­sonal, or cre­ative goals you need to gain aware­ness about where the hours are going. Face it, nobody can track all of the hours in their head, and you want to make sure you are spend­ing the hours on some­thing that that is impor­tant to you. Accord­ing to Mal­colm Glad­well in his book “Out­liers: The Story of Suc­cess,” it takes 10,000 hours of pur­su­ing some­thing to become truly excel­lent at it. Con­se­quently, achiev­ing your goals takes a sig­nif­i­cant time com­mit­ment. This is why time track­ing plays a pow­er­ful part in becom­ing pro­duc­tive and achiev­ing your long-term goals.

Essen­tially, using Life­Topix, all items that you cap­ture are tracked. How­ever, you can take full advan­tage of time track­ing capa­bil­i­ties by mark­ing items as Not Started, In Progress, On Hold, or Can­celed. You can record the effort of each task, such as the hours required, and when the task was started and finished.

Track Your Progress

Con­nect

The art and sci­ence of get­ting things done also means del­e­gat­ing tasks to oth­ers and exchang­ing ideas with oth­ers. How to del­e­gate tasks and to whom is another sub­ject alto­gether; how­ever, the power of effec­tive del­e­ga­tion can­not be ignored. Get­ting feed­back and col­lab­o­rat­ing with oth­ers gives you the power of knowl­edge that nobody can pos­sess solely on their own.

Life­Topix includes fea­tures for eas­ily del­e­gat­ing tasks to fam­ily, friends, or col­leagues. It gives you the abil­ity to assign own­ers to tasks and share those tasks via email, text mes­sage, Face­book, Twit­ter, Too­dledo, or Google. Shar­ing via social net­works gives you the abil­ity to col­lab­o­rate on a sub­ject. For exam­ple, per­haps you want col­lab­o­rate with your neigh­bors on the details of the neigh­bor­hood garage sale.

Share and Collaborate

Act

No plan can be well exe­cuted with­out it hav­ing action­able items such as tasks, check­lists, and appoint­ments. Once you cap­tured your items, you can decide if spend­ing the time and energy on your cur­rent projects, tasks, and other items will pro­duce a pay­off. As you act upon these items and note your com­ple­tion, you will rec­og­nize the self-esteem and con­fi­dence that results from your accomplishments.

At LightAr­row, we’d love to hear how you’ve used a sys­tem­atic approach to achiev­ing your long-term goals and how the power of pro­duc­tiv­ity has changed your life for the better.