Whether you prefer the vision board format or the life dashboard format, I would feel remiss if we didn’t explain to you, what role technology plays in this entire process, after all many people like myself live in a virtually paper free world and we store so many of our thoughts, dreams, ideas and memories in digital form.
Indeed, it’s a great idea to keep archives of your goals or even take periodic snapshots of your wheel of life so that you can go back in time and see how you were feeling before after or during major events in your life. There are lots of ways you can do this ranging from keeping the photos in an album, on your computer, to uploading them to dropbox or google drive and so much more. Personally, I choose to keep both text versions of my goals as well as snapshots of my entire life dashboard in a tool called Evernote.
Here’s why!
Evernote is a cross-platform cloud-hosted note-taking app. It has a handy utility built right into its mobile app, that will automatically recognize documents or whiteboards.
Once you focus on whatever it is, you’re scanning Evernote will align, scan and improve the quality of the image just as if you’d scanned it into the computer. However, there’s an even better feature than that because once it’s uploaded to the cloud, Evernote will perform optical character recognition on your image and will then make all the text in your image searchable.
This is great for going back and figuring out when it was that you first decided to set a goal, then finding out how long it took you or when it was that you finally completed it. As long as your handwriting is clear enough, Evernote will actually make everything in your image searchable and you can see how many times different words or phrases come up across all of your notes.
Additionally, Evernote allows you to embed images, text, audio and more into one note seamlessly, so that you can type or dictate notes to yourself about the changes you’ve made in your life dashboard or vision board and how you’re feeling about it as you go along.
Generally, any time I update my wheel of life which, by the way, is on average about every two weeks. I take a snapshot and then I make myself some quick notes as to why I’m adding to or subtracting from each section.
Furthermore, I like to keep my list of goals right there in Evernote because at the end of a six-month period, I simply duplicate the note, delete the goals that were completed and I already have a head start with at least 30 percent of them already typed out.
Last but not least Evernote, makes it very easy to share notes with friends, family or coaches which is really key if you want them to be involved in your progress and hold you accountable.
Ultimately, the tools you use matter. Less than the fact that you use them and you’ll have to experiment to find the right technology stack for you. Here is a link to Evernote and I definitely recommend checking it out for all of your journaling and documenting needs.
