The Story behind the Goalscape Map (old)

[Paul Keith]

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Link to Full Article

The challenge before us was complex. The 49er was a new class of boat that hardly anybody could handle and we had very little experience to build upon. We also knew we would have to take our racing skills and our physical fitness to completely new levels, as well as learning to sail the boat. And on top of all that we had organize everything ourselves and raise the money for what to many seemed like a 4-year holiday. Of course the reality was a lot of hard work with long days and plenty of ups and downs. It was intense, but very rewarding because we were really focused on our shared dream goal – and we loved to sail the boat for hours at a time, day after day.

We had incredibly long to-do lists, so it was frustrating and stressful trying to fit in everything we had to do each day. I knew that if we were to reach our goal, we had to approach this challenge in a better way. Setting the right priorities is easier said then done when entering uncharted territory: there always seemed too much to do and resources were scarce. But the clock was ticking, so we had to prioritize if we were to achieve anything at all.

What I needed was a visual map to show the entire structure of the challenge: every goal and subgoal. I wanted to fly over the landscape of goals and get the view from 30,000 feet: seeing all the goals at once and the connections between them. What’s more I had to track our progress in every area so I could always see exactly where we were in order to decide what to do next.

So I came up with the Goalscape goal map. A multi-level pie chart seemed to be the best way to break down the huge challenge into specific goals and subgoals in every area. The circle represented the fact that our resources were limited: when we spent time, money and energy in one area, we could not spend it anywhere else.

Well... at the risk of looking like I'm just link pasting, I'll try sharing my perspective for why this is notable but I apologize if the below only further confuses the issue. (un-click spoiler for long version)

Spoiler

Why is this notable?

In an ideal world, it would be why isn't this notable? Why is it that we have to make make-shift confusing arbitrary pie in the sky numbers such as 30,000 feet?

...but that's the sad thing about modern popular productivity.

It not only needs a competitor (like say someone who participates in sports) to reveal something such as:

Setting the right priorities is easier said then done when entering uncharted territory: there always seemed too much to do and resources were scarce. But the clock was ticking, so we had to prioritize if we were to achieve anything at all.

...but it takes him representing a computer application before we even hear or see or discuss it publicly in productivity articles.

It's a frustrating story. Why do we need to be productive? Why do we need to have reached something...before people notice? Before we let people notice?

FUCK! Productivity...getting organized...this is supposed to be about solutions. About project solving. About addressing little tidbits.

But we treat it like a fucking toy. Like once we're consumed with long to-do lists, there's only often us or consultants. Fucking open sourced code is alot more useful at revealling unproductivity than our own systems and worse, "we" is not you and I, it's often just "us and us and us" holed up within our world until something works. Until something clicks.

So why is this notable again?

Because it's rare for productivity articles to be written like this. It's rare for productivity systems' true origins to be shared in a free article where it's not about making the system look good or sound simple...it's about what happened. What made this system work for you not for something that you can't do, but something you would give all your heart and soul to do better but you just couldn't make happen...until a system or shape or result formed.

That's why this is notable, because I could not write an article like this yet. Because I have not read many free productivity articles written like this yet. So I just wanted to share this in a place where people would desire to get organized irregardless whether people care or comment. I just want more things like this in the hopes that one day, it would not take someone reaching the finish line before it makes me pay attention because as the article says, the clock is ticking.