How To Create and Follow Long Term Plans

I’m a big fan of planning. My calendar is always open and I check it a hundred times a day. In fact, I’ve just finished checking it now. The last few minutes has told me that I can manage my short-term pretty well. I seem set for the next few weeks, but what about my long-term dreams? I haven’t got any slots on the calendar for them. How do I know my life going in the right direction?

I have been thinking about it (enough to write this post) and as a result I now have a framework/method which I’m comfortable with.

First, I wrote down how my life will be in 10 years (2024). I thought about my relationships, work, home, hobbies, and everything I will have in general. I repeated the same tasks for 5 years time as well.

The hard part started when I thought, okay, this is great, but how it will become a reality? I should start to work on these goals next year, right? Yeah. So I continued: What should I do or improve in these areas in the next year if I would like to accomplish my 5 year goal?

The problem was that a year is still too long and far away. I know myself, I can be lazy and postpone things. So I decided to be strict and defined what I need to do next month and next week. Now I have things in my calendar for next week that will impact my life dreams. My long term plans and my calendar are finally connected. Perfect.

I have been using this system for 3 weeks now — and it works. It works, because it makes me conscious about what I’m doing and why and I think this is the key for long term success. Though definitive proof will take a decade, tangible lead data is just 7 days away. I review my weekly goals every Sunday and create new ones for next week. I can’t wait to define goals for December.

I created a doc with the framework, if you are interested, open it here (it’s a Google Doc).

If you find it useful or you have any thoughts, please send me a gmail to bado.andrea or comment here. Thank you!