A great book to read is Mark Forster's "How to make your dreams come true." He's a UK writer. He takes Robt Fritz's "Path of Least Resistance" book and generates a very usable set of techniques from them.

Very simplistically, you put yourself five years into the future and note all the details of your life/lifestyle/work/family/etc. Compare this vision to your life now. Don't get discouraged! Use that tension as a way to get your subconscious working on making that visualized future happen.

His (really rather short) book explains all this in more detail.

Another thing I do: I spread small to intermediate goals out over the course of the year, and sprinkle them into quarters. For example, I had a goal in 2Q of "Buy a new car." On April 1, I started my research and by the end of May, I'd found what I wanted (a Honda Fit, BTW).

A larger multi-year goal of "Get my master's degree" I've broken into multiple goals ("Take the GRE", "Apply to grad school" (due date is 4Q), "Sign up for summer classes," etc) and also spread them out into various quarters.

I've arranged all this on a PBWiki page called - ta-da - "Quarterly Projects," which I review every week or so, or whenever I want to see how I'm doing. Some goals/projects I attempted I finally just crossed out because I'd lost interest in them, or they're not relevant to how my life is working out.

Anyway -- lots of ways and things to try. Have to find the ones that grab you and resonate with your experience.