Have you heard of this?

Have you heard of Mindbloom? I just learned about it last week and I think it's fantastic. It's a website where you set goals, determine what areas to focus on in your life, prioritize your time, and in doing so you create this adorable little tree. Each branch represents an area of your life you feel is important, and you can start out with three branches. Mine, for example, are Relationships (family), Spirituality, and Health. (Other choices on the list are Career, Lifestyle, Finances, Creativity, or Leisure.) You set simple, attainable goals within these branches, and as you accomplish them you earn more "seeds" (points) which you can use to set further goals, add leaves to your tree (divisions of your branches), and additional branches.

They give you lots of ideas for goals, such as "drink at least 8 glasses of water each day," "take some time to listen to one family member today," or "spend some time today in prayer," for example. You can choose your own customized goals as well.

Yellow/brown leaves are areas that need more attention; green leaves are healthy. For the record, the image above is NOT my tree; mine's all cute and green today! :)

There is also a social-networking aspect; you can invite friends and have a whole forest full of other people's trees, for group support of accomplishing your goals, I suppose. And you can link to your facebook account if you choose to. For me, most of my goals are more personal... but if you did want to have a forest full of friends, you can keep selected branches of your tree private.

I have had fun with this so far (the past week or so). What I like about this is that it forces you to start small; you can't set too many goals at once -- which for many people could be a set-up for failure. I don't know if it's human nature or just my nature, but I have loved visiting my tree every day to check off goals I've accomplished, however small, and have Mindbloom tell me what a great job I'm doing. It may sound silly but it's working for me!