In order to organise your thoughts and your time, perhaps whilst preparing for a cycle expedition or for any project you want to achieve, try the super-minimal ZTD approach (adapted from Zen Habits). Trust me, the following will profoundly affect your life:

1. Capture. Get a notebook and carry it everywhere. Write down all your thoughts, ideas, to-do items, doodles, whatever. Download a to-do list program like Abstract Spoon To-do list and regularly transfer the items into this list. Have a physical inbox in your workplace or home- and put incoming stuff in it.


2. Process. Go through your to-do list and inbox and process the items quickly, making quick decisions. Do it at least once a day. If it takes less that two minutes to do the task or deal with the item, do it, otherwise either delegate it, or give it a date or put it back on your to-do list or file it away in an archive. Give it a status:  action, waiting, someday maybe, etc. Check out these GTD desktop wallpapers.


3. Plan. Time plans are massively important. Each week set your big rocks- max 3 per week, the big things you want to achieve. Each day set max three MIT's (most important tasks) - make sure you finish them by the end of the day. Do your MITs early in the day if possible and get them out of the way. You can try an open-source project management program like Open Workbench. If you work in an organisation, particularly charity with a small budget you could try a collaborative application like Collabtive or Open Atrium


4. Do. Focus on one task at a time, and eliminate distractions. Write any incoming requests or distractions in your capture notebook as per step one.

It will take a bit of getting used to and you might find yourself stopping and randomly writing stuff down in your notebook but that's good. Hopefully it will help to capture some of those ideas and dreams floating around!