Sometimes people ask me how I plan for the year. Honestly, my approach changes a bit every year because I change. That said, I’d like to share with you how I will approach my planning this year in the hope you might find something useful. Let me start by saying this from the start…
I don’t believe there is one right approach, even though lots of people are very willing to sell you their planning approach. I’m not against buying someone else’s approach because you can always learn something about planning. I’ve bought other people’s planning processes in the past, and that has been helpful. But at some point, I think you will find you will unnecessarily chafe when using someone else’s plan and will ultimately want to develop your own approach.
I’m telling you this because I’m not sharing my approach to convince you it is the end-all, be-all. It isn’t. It is my approach and it works for me. And it evolves over time. This very process I’m sharing now is my intended evolution in the process for this year. Don’t be constrained by it. Find your own way. This said, in the hope that seeing mine might help you, here’s mine…
Start with Reflection
I separate reflecting on the prior year and planning for the new year. If only by a day or two, separating one from the other gives my brain some processing time. I wrote about my reflection process here.
Planning Phases Overview
The way I approach it, creating an annual plan has four essential phases or parts:
- Get Grounded: Here I scan my prior year reflection to ready myself for planning.
- Define Goals + Intentions: This is what I want to accomplish for the year — the first section of my one-page plan.
- Identify Changes: This is how I will need to change in order to accomplish my goals and intentions — the second section of my one-page plan.
- Envision Being: This is how I want to “be” in the new year, the inner state I will cultivate — the third section of my one-page plan.
Parts 2 and 3 are the heart of the process: For you, these may suffice. Part 1 simply gets me ready. Part 4 helps me remember that life isn’t just about achieving/doing (Goals + Intentions) and changing/transforming (Identify Changes). Life is only ever available now, and my state of being (inner place from which I operate) influences and infuses everything I do, and how I feel in life. That’s Step 4. It’s a personal thing which may not be your thing at all. Just use what works for you.
Part 1: Get Grounded
1. Get Grounded: Scan my prior year reflection notes. What from the previous year should inform this new year?
This gets me grounded and ready to plan. If you haven’t already reflected and you just want to get on with it, here’s a quick start tip you can do in 15 minutes or less right now. Answer these four questions:
- What were my setbacks, disappointments, and key incompletions in the year just ended/ending?
- What were my successes, lucky breaks, and key completions in the year just ended/ending?
- What did I learn?
- What would I like to do differently in the upcoming year?
Part 2: Define Goals + Intentions
2. Brainstorming: What are all the things I might want to accomplish this year?
I just start writing a bunch of bullet points of what I might like to accomplish in the upcoming year and I keep writing until the well is dry. I think it is important to get all possibilities out on a page or two in my journal.
3. The ONE Thing: What is the one most important thing I want to accomplish this year?
I review my brainstormed list and use my feelings and my purpose statement to guide me in choosing my ONE Thing. This is always a “gulp” moment for me because my personality type doesn’t like eliminating options… not at all (Enneagram Seven). But after nearly sixty years of living, I’ve learned that keeping all options open = getting nothing substantial completed and hard-wired. For you, that may be no big deal.
4. Other Goals + Intentions: What else is important to me to achieve this year?
This is where you must decide what works for you. Some people will tell you to plan 7 or even 10 goals for the year. For me, that’s a recipe for failure and disappointment. I have tried it, and I’ve never succeeded with it. I need ONE Thing, one primary goal. But that list I brainstormed above in step 2 has some very important things on it. So here’s what I now do.
- Second-Tier Goals — I select another two to three items, and these become second-tier goals. During the year, I continually revisit whether working on these secondary goals isn’t compromising my ONE Thing. I must continually monitor myself because my enthusiasm and distractibility continually put me at risk of dissipation. Two second-tier goals are perfect for me, but given my work and life responsibilities at this point in my life, I usually end up with three. That gives me my ONE Thing goal and three secondary goals. That’s workable.
- Intentions — There are other things important to me to hold my focus on that brainstorming list that didn’t make it to “goal” status. I want to make some progress or attend to these things, but I can’t afford to give them the focus and structure I give to my goals. Such as one thing I intend to get better at is having more fun and recreation with Sara. If I don’t focus on it, I can drift into working too much. However, simply reminding myself helps me course correct. It doesn’t need the structure and focus I’d give a goal. So I allow myself to pull another 4-5 items from my brainstorm list and I write those out as Intentions.
After completing the above steps I now have the first section of my one-page plan written down as follows:
GOALS + INTENTIONS
- The ONE Thing
- [Goal name and description]
- Second-Tier Goals
- [S-T Goal 1 name and description]
- [S-T Goal 2 name and description]
- [S-T Goal 3 name and description]
- Intentions
- [Intention 1 name and description]
- [Intention 2 name and description]
- [Intention 3 name and description]
- [Intention 4 name and description]
- [Intention 5 name and description]
Now that I’ve broadened past my ONE Thing, I’m really getting a feeling for the year and whether I feel good about my goals. Usually, as I look at the whole, a tweak or two is needed as something new occurs to me. I’ll feel the anxiety of honing down to the ONE Thing broaden and deepen into a feeling of excitement. I’m seeing, sensing, and feeling what I want to achieve and attend to in the new year as a whole.
If I’ve done my job, I will end up with no more than seven to nine items in total. There’s some science behind that here called “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” The gist of it is that most people can “hold” seven items, with some only able to “hold” five to six and others able to “hold” eight or nine. Other research claims that four is optimal. My capacity is on the shorter end of the range.
Perhaps it is occurring to you that I am working with my limitations by having the nine items above (sometimes seven or eight) listed and categorized in order of importance. And I know myself well enough to know that I must focus on keeping the ONE Thing on track, and then use whatever time and resources I have on the other items. It took me quite a while to come up with this approach, but boy if I scan that list each week and assign my time and focus from the top down, that just works for me.
Part 3: Identify Changes
In Step 1 I defined what I want to accomplish, but there is more to do if I want to have any reason to hope I can achieve what I’ve set forth in Step 1. Why? I want you to ponder on this:
If I were already capable of accomplishing those things, I would have done so already.
The reason so many people fail to accomplish their goals is they falsely believe the only reason they haven’t already accomplished their goals is they’ve simply not focused on them. That is the great delusion and many dreams and goals have foundered on the rocks hidden in that fog. Don’t. I want something different for you.
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become in achieving your goals.” Henry David Thoreau
My results mirror who I am. The most powerful lever I have in achieving what I want is to change myself. It’s an inside job. And the external goals are simply external points of reference so I can accurately see if my internal changes are real or imagined. The mirror of results doesn’t lie. Your results mirror you. My results mirror me. That is both the inconvenient truth and the most powerful goal-planning insight you can have.
When I say “Identify Changes,” I’m thinking in terms of three things:
- Behavior Change: A key behavior I need to change to achieve my Goals + Intentions
- New Habits: A handful of new habits that will help me achieve them
- Finding Time: The hard truth is I usually cannot achieve my new Goals + Intentions if I don’t free up time.
5. Behavior Change: What’s the most important behavior I will need to change in order to achieve what I want to accomplish?
This is more feeling than thinking. Here’s what I do to feel my way through this:
- Brainstorm: I brainstorm all the various ways my behavior might need to change. (Sometimes I refer to my DISC and Enneagram reports.)
- Select: I land on one behavior change as the one I think is most important.
- Validate: I run it by Sara and people I work with or who know me personally to get their input. It is awfully hard to see into my own blind spot. Further, typically the behavior I’m doing that is holding me back is holding others back and frustrating them, too. So they know or at least have a good feeling for how I’m tripping myself up (or am likely to trip myself up).
There it is. That’s the behavior I will work on changing. It’s what we call an adaptive challenge. I can’t simply change the behavior using “Just Do It” as my motto. This behavior will require me to break some automatic impulses, face and step over some fears, and change how I think. It’s my personal transformation goal for the year.
6. New Habits: What handful of new habits will help me accomplish my Goals + Intentions?
Habits to me are like rituals and don’t require the same amount of effort to change as the behavior change in #5 above. These are the types of things that I can decide I need to do, put a little habit tracking grid in my journal or on my desk, and I check them off. Sometimes they are daily habits, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly. I keep them to seven or fewer, and I put them in order of priority. The most important habit first.
My process is the same as #5 above but I don’t validate the new habits with others. I brainstorm, select up to seven, and list them in order of impact. This way, as I track them, I can see whether the most important ones are being done first. That’s it. Pretty straightforward.
7. Finding Time: How much time will I need each week to do the above, and what will I give up to free up that time?
This step is hard for me. I’ve noticed it isn’t necessarily easy for a lot of people. We seem to think we can endlessly add more and more to our lives without eliminating anything. Then we wonder why we are harried, frenetic, exhausted, burned out, crazy people.
That said, the process is pretty simple. Step back, look at what I want to accomplish per this unfolding plan, and ask myself how much time I need each week to accomplish all that. Then I ask myself where that time is going to come from, as I have no cushion of available time given where I’m currently at.
Enter the paradox: Like anyone else, I have all the time I need to accomplish the most important things, yet all my time is currently taken up. This is actually the first example of the point I made above, which is to accomplish what I’ve outlined for the new year, I must change. The first thing that must change is how I am spending my time. Otherwise, I have no time to even get started on the new, much less consistently working on it.
Tips:
1. Don’t make a science project out of this. Just identify, for example, 1–3 high leverage things for you to stop doing or to do in much less time. You really just need a good foothold. Once you start making progress towards your new goals, you will find even more ways to free up time and energy to work on them.
2. You may need to change who will do the work or how the work is done. When it comes to “eliminating,” sometimes freeing up your time isn’t about stopping doing something altogether. It may be required work, but you may be able to streamline it, automate it, or delegate it.
For example, the way I currently handle our finances and investments is overly complex. I am changing how that is set up — eliminating accounts, investing in fewer ETF’s, etc. I’m changing the how. And one of my team members can pick up some parts of the financial accounting and reporting I do, and will actually do it better. That’s changing the who. This not only frees up my time, it will release me from the psychic load of keeping something that is overly complex in my head. In other words, it isn’t just about time. It’s about energy.
This is the same for the new work related to the upcoming year’s goals. I have some BIG goals for the new year. So big that I can’t possibly do it alone. Therefore, achieving my new goals isn’t only about me finding more time. It’s about me including more people and leveraging the power of highly engaged teams.
3. It may help to assign time measures to the new work you are taking on and what you are eliminating. Make guesstimates rounded to the quarter- or half-hour. The total time for tasks eliminated should be somewhat equal to the time required for the new work. It isn’t that scientific. It just forces us to be a bit more honest with ourselves.
4. Sometimes I think about redesigning my week as I ponder on what to eliminate. With my work, responsibilities, and the way my brain works, it helps me to “chunk” like things together. Creating, Meeting, Planning, Administrating, Accomplishing, and Delivering are major categories for me, for example.
If I’m constantly switching from one to the other, I burning up brain capacity unnecessarily. Task switching takes energy. If I can assign a half-day or even a full day to doing one thing like client delivery, meeting with people, or working on my goals I’m much more efficient. And happy.
Now, in addition to my GOALS + INTENTIONS section above, I’ve got this underneath it on my one-page plan:
THE HOW: ACHIEVING MY GOALS + INTENTIONS
- Behavior Change
- In order to accomplish my goals and intentions, I am committed to getting better at ___________.
- New Habits
- [Habit 1 name and frequency]
- [Habit 2 name and frequency]
- [Habit 3 name and frequency]
- [Habit 4 name and frequency]
- [Habit 5 name and frequency]
- [Habit 6 name and frequency]
- [Habit 7 name and frequency]
- Finding Time
- [Item 1 name, eliminate/streamline/automate/delegate, amount of time]
- [Item 2 name, eliminate/streamline/automate/delegate, amount of time]
- [Item 3 name, eliminate/streamline/automate/delegate, amount of time]
Part 4: Envision Being
8. Being: Develop one or two “being” statements for how I want to experience life, now.
I have challenges with anxiety, and one way I “deal” with that is that I stay overly busy. Of course, acting out of anxiety isn’t actually dealing with it and acting from that place creates problems. More things to be anxious about, laughably. My antidote is something I learned from Sara. Continually reminding myself how I want to feel inside, now. Not at some point in the future. Not after I achieve my goals. Not after I think we have enough money to retire. Not after I get myself physically fit again. Now.
Being isn’t predicated on conditions, past, or future. I find myself needing to constantly remind myself of this. And that is the point of this simple last step. How do I want to be in as many moments of the new year as possible?
This is probably just one or two little bullets. One might have to do with my general state of being. The other might be how I want to be with other people. I don’t need to say a lot about this. Instead, I will just give two examples below of these two ways of looking at being — in general, and in relating to others.
I now have the third and final section of my one-page plan for the new year:
BEING
- In general, I want to be at ease. I continually relax into what is and feel the abundance, aliveness, and potential in each moment.
- In relating, I want to be honest and kind and emit hope.
- When I’m playing nice or avoiding rejection or resistance, I will be fully honest (and kind).
- When I’m triggered and am harsh or mean, I will be kind (and honest).
- As a result of their interactions with me and my state of being, I’d like to help people feel safe, cared for, capable, and hopeful.
That’s the Wrap!
With that, I now have a one-page plan for the year. The more I look at it, connect with it, and align with it, the better my year goes. In the inevitable and unforeseeable vicissitudes of life, that’s the lighthouse. It keeps me oriented. As each quarter unfolds, the plan may be tweaked. It isn’t written in stone. As my plan meets reality and as I grow and evolve, the plan must. If the plan becomes my master, I’ve always found it to be a harsh one. That’s my job.
You may be left with a lot of questions about how you now go achieve this plan. I can understand. The majority of people won’t write a plan at all. And a majority of the minority that does write a plan won’t focus on the plan and therefore will not achieve it. I’ll leave you with a couple of tips and suggestions:
- Make your one-page plan your own. My plan is complicated. I’ve evolved it over the years and it suits me. Make your plan suit you. And that may mean making yours less complicated. Simple. Simple is good.
- Include a review of your plan in your weekly planning process. Keep reconnecting with it. You’d be surprised how naturally you start changing what you do if you keep reminding yourself what’s important.
- Each day, set the top three things you need to accomplish. I call those my Big 3. Make sure at least one moves your plan forward. All other tasks for the day go in a category called Other. Big 3 tasks. Other tasks. Don’t let the Other trump the Big 3 or you’ll lose the game.
- Consider “time-blocking.” Consider booking appointments in your calendar with yourself to work your plan. Hold this time as sacred. Move it around, but don’t delete it and don’t push it into the weekend.
- Consider periodic “time-auditing.” For a day, a week, a month, track the amount of time you spend directly working your plan and calculate that as a percentage of the time you work. Over time, increase the percentage of your time that is directly moving your plan forward until you feel good about how you are investing your time.
- Consider Bullet Journaling. BuJo is something I started in 2019 and love it. I’ve tried A LOT of planners, planning approaches, apps, etc. over the past three decades. BuJo works for me and a lot of other people around the world. It was developed by Ryder Carroll and you can find out more about it at his website here and he’s written an excellent book on the method here.
- For inspiration on getting clear and getting focused, I recommend two books in this order:
- Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
- The ONE Thing by Gary Keller
- Include a motivation statement at the end of your one-page plan. One way to keep the motivation is to be clear on two things. First, what will become possible for you that isn’t possible today if you achieve your plan. Second, what your default future looks like if you don’t achieve your plan. If that makes sense to you, add this to the bottom of your one-page plan. Read that statement. And feel it. Every week.
I am wishing you all the best for your making this your best year yet. May you accomplish great things this year through growing yourself, and may you find a way of being in the world where you are at ease and where others may feel safe, challenged, and vibrantly alive when they are in your presence.
Appendix: The One-Page Plan
GOALS + INTENTIONS
- The ONE Thing
- [Goal name and description]
- Second-Tier Goals
- [S-T Goal 1 name and description]
- [S-T Goal 2 name and description]
- [S-T Goal 3 name and description]
- Intentions
- [Intention 1 name and description]
- [Intention 2 name and description]
- [Intention 3 name and description]
- [Intention 4 name and description]
- [Intention 5 name and description]
THE HOW: ACHIEVING MY GOALS + INTENTIONS
- Behavior Change
- In order to accomplish my goals and intentions, I am committed to getting better at ___________.
- New Habits
- [Habit 1 name and frequency]
- [Habit 2 name and frequency]
- [Habit 3 name and frequency]
- [Habit 4 name and frequency]
- [Habit 5 name and frequency]
- [Habit 6 name and frequency]
- [Habit 7 name and frequency]
- Finding Time
- [Item 1 name, eliminate/streamline/automate/delegate, amount of time]
- [Item 2 name, eliminate/streamline/automate/delegate, amount of time]
- [Item 3 name, eliminate/streamline/automate/delegate, amount of time]
BEING: HOW I WANT TO BE, NOW
- In general, I want to be _____.
- In relating, I want to be _____.