A few days ago while at a Christmas party I had an interesting conversation with a fellow IT professional. It turned out that both of us had been investigating and tried out different productivity and life strategy systems for quite a while and had come to more or less the same conclusions. One of the things we discussed was the idea of using roadmaps for achieving goals.

It was while discussing roadmaps that the conversation lead into talking about intention and the fact that the achievement of complex goals does not follow straight roadmaps. They could, but the road to the completion of a goal is not always an easily predictable one. The declaration and communication of the intent is probably the most important step in successfull goal completion. By communicating intent we discover and invite commentary and advice from external sources which we otherwise probably would not have considered.

The last few weeks I have put a lot of thought into how roadmaps might be defined (I am working on a service where individuals can specify, measure and attain goals in a relevant and time-bound manner, S.M.A.R.T). I struggled with having to define rigid roadmaps (one size fits all) but I am now quite sure that intent has to play a significant role and that these roadmaps should probabley be generated on the basis of how other people have succesfully achieved goals.

I have noticed forays into this already, plancast.com comes to mind. They define themselves as:

A service for sharing your upcoming plans with friends. It’s a social calendar of sorts

On plancast.com you submit your future plans and your friends will be able to hear about them and even join them which I guess will make for a more defined or contextualized experience. (Having like-minded indivduals around you should enhance the experience.)

Another person who has noticed this is Jeremy Owyang, he even named it The Intention Web (or anticipation web, forward-thinking web). Owyang argues that:

With event planning features, like Facebook events, upcoming.org, we’re starting to see people make explicity public remarks on what they want to do, when, and with who.

I think this is exciting and it doesn´t take much imagination to see that the possibilites are big here.

What do you think?