How To Plan Your Best Year Ever

10 min readJan 27, 2022

This is my first post of the year so I wish you a Happy New Year.

If you want to make this your Best Year ever, continue reading.

Introduction to Planning your Year

Is it important to have goals? Well, this is a good question. If you ask me, you need to have either goals or routines. You need to have a compass, something to strive towards. You either need to have a goal or a habit. But you need to know what you want first.

Let me explain with an example. Let’s say you want to be healthy. This is not really a goal as it’s too broad. But you can have one or several goals associated with this.

I want to lose 5 kg
Bench press 100 kg
I want to have a fat percentage of less than 20%
etc

Or, you could have habits instead, like:

eat healthy every weekday
go to sleep every day by 11 PM
go to the gym at least 4 times a week
eat in 8-hour windows
etc

Some people say that goals are important and some people say that the process is more important. What really matters, after all, is that you want to improve in one (or more) areas of your life.

From my point of view, goals are important and you can only reach those goals with good habits.

The goal is the destination and the habits are your means of transportation.

You need to keep track of your progress. And this should be done at regular intervals, from a daily review to a weekly review and so on. There are people that are very successful and they don’t do a yearly review. But they do one every 3 months, for example, or every 5 years. It’s up to you how often you want to check up on your goals.

I, for example, have yearly, quarterly, weekly, and daily reviews. And it would be very hard to manage my priorities without these reviews.

It all starts with the belief that you can do it, you can have your best year ever!

So, what should your plan look like?

The Framework

I will list the steps below and discuss them further in more detail.

Review your past year
Assess your priorities based on your life’s interests
Define goals according to those priorities
Plan them across the year
Regularly review your goals
Celebrate

Now let’s take them one by one.

1. Review your past year

This is a whole process by itself and I won’t get into many details. To simplify this, we need to think about what happened over the period of the year. If we had goals, how many of them we fulfilled? If you hadn’t, just think about what went on in your life.

First, go through the things that stick out. Like changing your job, running your first half-marathon, or maybe a dinner that you remember. Your Birthday party, time spent with your kids, some bad news, etc.

Then, I suggest you take your calendar (or calendar app) and go month by month. What were the things that brought happiness and what made you sad?

Go through the list and find patterns. Which were the circumstances or people that brought joy in your life? What about things that made you nervous or just unhappy?

You can figure out what happens next 🙂 Take these insights into your plan for the new year. When you decide on your goals, remember what to put on your “to-do list” and what to put on your “not-to-do” one.

2. What are your interests? The Wheel of Life

The next step is to think about the areas in your life. This exercise could have different results for everyone.

For example, I think a minimal approach to this would be:

You can extend on this, coaches use what is called “the wheel of life”, and it includes the following:

Family and Friends
Significant Other
Career
Finances
Health
Home Environment:
Fun & Leisure
Personal Growth

And you can split this further, there are a lot of variants, but I would keep it simple.

Now, take the areas that you decide upon and think about how satisfied you are with that particular area. Grade that from 1 to 10. So let’s say you take the areas I talked about initially. And your results could be:

P.S: I recommend a free online test for this, for Michael Hyatt’s life-areas. Take the test here: https://assessments.michaelhyatt.com/lifescore/

Of course, some might be important for you and some might not. There is no equal sign between the areas. If you are a student, for example, the “Finances” part might not be as important as it would be for someone with a family and a mortgage.

With this in mind, you can decide what are the areas in which you want to make improvements this year. (Hint: don’t try to get a 10/10 for each of them because that’s impossible).

Just start small.

3. Define goals according to those priorities

Let’s say you identified the areas in which you want to make improvements. And these are:

Now, your next step would be to define some goals regarding these areas. You can define somewhere between 7–10 goals. But if you are just starting out with the yearly plans I recommend having no more than 3 goals.

Write down your SMART Goals and the needed activities

I won’t get into SMART Goals here (as that’s a vast topic by itself) but what I can tell you is that the goals should be specific enough.

For example goals like: “ get fit”, “ have a lot of money” or “ travel a lot” are not very suitable goals. They are very relative and “ a lot of money “ might be different for you than it is for me. You need clarity in your life, which means you need to be more specific in defining these goals.

Your goals could look like this instead:

Go to the gym at least 12 times a month
Drop my body fat to 21% by September 1st
Save at least 20% of my income every month
Read 10 books on Project Management in the first 6 months

You get the idea. Just make sure these goals are a stretch but realistic still. Psychology tells us that if a goal is not challenging enough we will get bored and if it’s too difficult we will drop it as soon as we face challenges.

Also, make sure you write down your goals. A study made at the Dominican University in Chicago states that if you write down your goals you are 1.4 times more likely to achieve them.

So write them down on a piece of paper, in your notebook, or in your to-do app. Or just in an excel file.

Then, prepare a little for them. Draw up a high-level plan of activities that you would need to do in order to achieve your goals. This is important so that you understand how long it will take to reach your objective, if you are blocked by other activities or if you need to do it in a particular season (It’s hard to reach your “ Learn how to ski “ goal in July, right?).

So, if your goal is to lose 10kg you can detail the plan like this:

Research meal plans
Throw away all the sweets in the house
Ask around for a personal trainer
Meet with the personal trainer
Buy gym clothes
Buy running shoes
Go to the gym 3 times a week
Run once a week
Cut down alcohol
Research ways to sleep better
Go to sleep earlier
Every Sunday prepare the meals for your week

Of course, this is just an example but you get the picture.

4. Plan your goals across the year

As the focus is very important, spread your goals across the year. Don’t have 5 goals that you start working on in January and need to be done by April. Based on priorities and the high-level plan you just sketched, set some goals starting January, some in April, and some in August. If you don’t start small and precise you’ll fail for sure.

Also, make sure you understand how long it would take to fulfill a goal. If you set your goal of losing 10kg in November there are high chances you won’t be able to do it.

And it might look like this:

5. Regularly Review and Re-plan your Goals

Quarterly Review and Plan

At least every 3 months go through your list of goals and understand the status. Maybe you completed some of them, maybe some are no longer relevant. We need to be scientists in every aspect of our lives. Always check what works and where we can improve. So I recommend having a quarterly review. In this way, you can make sure your goals are still relevant and you are making progress towards them. A lot of people plan their life quarter by quarter, as I detailed in this article.

Also, use this moment to give up on some of those goals and maybe get new ones. This is one thing that’s wrong with New Years Resolution. You set some goals at the beginning of the year and if life happens then you either forget about them or just don’t remember to adapt those goals.

Let’s say your goal at the beginning of the year was to get a Professional Certification that would benefit your job, let’s say one for “Software Testing”. In April you get a promotion and you are a Team Leader now. So that certification is no longer valid. Do you take the time to update your goals so that it reflects the current situation? Of course, the initial goal is no longer relevant but do you set a new one instead?

Weekly Review and Plan

Most goals are related to specific actions. If your goal is to lose 10 kg, that means you need to be consistent in the actions that will get you there. For example: eat fewer carbs, go to the gym 3 times a week, get enough sleep, etc.

If you don’t track this week by week it will be very difficult to reach your goals. Sometimes just tracking your weight every week is not enough, you need to track also the habits that support this goal.

As Brian Moran explains in his book, “The 12-week Year” we can use lead or lag indicators for our progress:

Lag indicators: these are the end goals and you track yourself on how near or far you are from them. For example: if your goal for the 12-week is to get 1000 new subscribers to your blog’s e-mail list, after 2 weeks if you have already 400 new subscribers that means you are ahead on your track and can move forward with your actions. The plan would have been to have about 340 after 2 weeks. If you have 300, that means you are behind and you need to check your lead indicators.
Lead indicators are the weekly plans, your tactics. You want to keep track of how well you follow your plan, which will get you to your own goal.

For example, you want to lose 20 pounds in 12 weeks, and you have the following weekly tactics:

Go to the gym 4 times a week
Limit your daily calory intake to a maximum of 1800 calories.

At the end of the week, you track how often you performed these actions. Did you manage to go to the gym 4 times? How many days did you eat more than 1800 calories? We track this by using a weekly scorecard.

Also, what I suggest is to have 3 big things or mini-goals that you set for yourself every week. At the end of the week review how your progress was in regards to your goals.

For example, if we are still talking about the goal from above, let’s say that our weekly goals are:

Find a nutritionist.
Go to the gym 3 times.
Go for your first run.

This planning and review session should take something between 30 to 60 minutes.

Daily Plan

Now, you have your plan for your week, you should make sure every day is lived according to that plan. So, I suggest that you set no more than 3 tasks that should be your daily priorities. I recently wrote an article about how you should only have only one daily highlight for your day. So you can have one daily highlight and 2 supporting tasks. You can do this easily in any task management tool, by setting one task to have P1 and 2 tasks as P2.

This doesn’t mean it’s all that you’ll get done today. What I’m saying is that if you get these done, it wouldn’t matter about the other tasks. Your day will still be a success.

So with the above example:

Daily Highlight: Set up an appointment with the nutritionist that your cousin recommended.
Go to the gym.
Look for running shoes online.

The planning will take maximum 10 minutes at the beginning of each day. Play with these numbers, if you find out at the end of the day that 3 tasks are too much, lower the number. If you finish them easily, increase the number or make them a bit more challenging. (Maybe instead of “looking for running shoes online” you could have it as “search for running shoes online and buy them”).

Because our future is just a collection of our days, we need to make sure we make each day purposeful.

Celebrate

If you have the discipline, put in the work, and adapt to your situation you will surely start marking goals off the list.

Sooner than later you will succeed with your goals. Always remember to celebrate. No matter how easy or hard it was to attain the goal, mark the event somehow. Go to a movie or for a long walk, drink a glass of Prosecco, whatever makes you happy. It’s important for your brain’s “lizard part” to associate goal fulfillment with pleasurable moments.

There is a caveat here, make sure that the celebration doesn’t impact your goal in a serious way. For example: if your goal was to get to a body fat of 20% it might be harmful to celebrate this achievement by eating a whole cake.

Try to have healthy celebrations, in time these will replace the more traditional ones.

Conclusions

Jocko Wilink, the former Navy Seal officer turned writer has a book called “Discipline Equals Freedom”. And this is a concept that I truly embrace. But I would take it down a notch by saying: “Clarity equals freedom”. Before having the discipline to take the action we need to be clear on where we want to go and who we want to be.

And these questions will probably take a lifetime to be answered but let’s look ahead just for one year, or better yet, one day.

So, live your best year, one day at a time.

Originally published at https://leoalexandru.com on January 27, 2022.