Musings of a Marketing Maven

It’s that time of year again, time to review what worked (and what didn’t) in 2009, imag­ine new pos­si­bil­i­ties, dream, and set inten­tions for the com­ing year. I’ve been enjoy­ing the process of set­ting some action­able goals for 2010, while iden­ti­fy­ing some larger aspi­ra­tions that I’d like to trans­late into action.

To pre­pare my plan for 2010 I’ve been read­ing a bunch of books, mag­a­zines and online resources.

The chal­lenge, of course, is how to make sure you fol­low through on the New Year’s res­o­lu­tions, once past the early enthu­si­asm and first few weeks of good intentions…

At the advice of friends, I’ve decided to exper­i­ment with a new online ser­vice that helps peo­ple plan and track progress on their life’s goals.

I’ve sub­scribed to the online ser­vice called Mind­bloom, to see if its play­ful technology-assisted approach can help keep me on track… The UI is fun and very easy to learn. Each of the leaves in the tree illus­trated here rep­re­sents a goal, a source of inspi­ra­tion, and a set of planned actions with tar­get follow-through dates. The founders believe that you can accom­plish big goals by break­ing them down into smaller actions, things you can accom­plish on a day-by-day basis.

So far the ser­vice looks promis­ing, although I’ve encoun­tered a num­ber of bugs. The ser­vice is very new, so it’s clear the soft­ware is still in the shake-down phase, the func­tion­al­ity stripped to the core essentials.

My cats like the sound track, a bird tweet­ing in the back­ground, but after the first few encoun­ters, I find it cloy­ing and annoy­ing. It’s now turned off.

There’s a con­flict between a num­ber of the service’s assump­tions and my desires; at present there’s no way to make my per­sonal pref­er­ences over­ride Mindbloom’s defaults, so I’m not yet con­vinced I’ll stick with the service.

But for now, I’m hope­ful that the Mind­bloom approach will be more fruit­ful than end­less cas­cades of to-do lists and Post-It notes, fol­lowed by for­get­ful­ness, dis­trac­tions and then regrets. I’ll give it a shot, and see if my track record for com­pleted New Year’s res­o­lu­tions in 2010 improves as a result.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if Mind­bloom can func­tion as a vir­tual “per­sonal coach” to keep me on track, and gen­tly prompt me to make good on my inten­tions. If so, 2010 will prove to be a way bet­ter year than 2009 has been. And that will be great for me, my fam­ily, my friends and my business.

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