It’s the first of January, 2020. The new decade is finally here..
If you live anywhere near a a city or have had any contact with popular TV or online media, you’re probably flooded with tons of New Year’s wishes, and a whole lot of resolutions and inspirational quotes right now. Chances are you too have a list of things you want to achieve in 2020, and have probably talked to a bunch of friends about them.
Here’s the elephant in the room though:
All those resolutions and all of the inspiration will come to nothing if you don’t really have a plan. So let’s learn to plan, and then plan to succeed.
Assuming you agree, the rest of this article will lay out a simple way to plan your 2020 goals, down to weekly planning, and give you a system to ensure a great follow through.
Summary — if you’re short on time:
Your success depends on the clarity of your goals, the quality of your plan, and the system within which you execute this plan. All of these are mostly in your control, and that’s all you need. The quality of your plan depends on the level of detail and how you break the major goals into smaller monthly or weekly goals. Your system of execution should help you stick to your plan, adjust as needed, and account for distractions or minor lapses without letting them derail your progress.
Clarity of goals
What exactly do you want? Not what will I do, or how will I do it, but what do I really want for myself? The answers to the following two questions will help you clarify your goals:
- At the end of the year, what do you want to have?
- How will you know that you have realized your vision?
When you ask these questions, the answers might seem awkward or shallow at first, for example, if you want to lost weight and get healthier, you might say I want to feel better and weigh less.
At this point, it’s worth asking the questions again, and maybe a few more times, until you come up with something that is specific and feels right to you e.g. I want to stop eating meat products, and lose at least 6 kilos.
Now that you have specific goals, it’s time to figure out how your journey might look:
The roadmap
Roadmaps are simply markings on a map denoting the path you plan to take in order to reach your destination. In our case, a roadmap will hold your path to reaching your goals.
One of the simplest ways to do this is to put your goal at the end of the year, like in the illustration below:
And start working your way back from the goal i.e. how far along do you want to be at mid year? Working further back, how far will you be at the end of March?
How about end of January?
How about this week? What is the first action that will get you started?
I suggest filling in weekly projections for the first month, monthly projections for the first 3 months, and quarterly projections. That way, you don’t have to worry about planning out your entire year, and you keep enough room for adjustments. As you execute your plan, you will see pretty quickly that the path is going to change, and what you thought might only happen in October may already become possible in April, and something else might take a few weeks longer than expected. That is ok, that is exactly why we planned this way.
Having a plan has already put you in the top few percent of people in the world who are much more likely to realize some of those new year’s resolutions. Welcome to the club. But that’s not enough. The winning formula is missing one crucial piece.
The System
We are all very familiar with “I started, but then I got busy and/or distracted…”
Distractions are part of life, and if you do not have a line of defence against them, please do not waste any time making the plan because that will only serve as a reminder of the things you wanted but never achieved.
What we need is a system that will help us focus, and fight off distractions. For this one, we are going to borrow from the world of software engineering and have a simple repeatable structure for our weeks:
The Agile weekly system
Weekly Planning -> Daily check-ins -> Review
Start your week with a simple exercise: look at your goals, and write down a handful of things that will help you achieve them. Then think about how you will make sure to do those things. For the sake of simplicity let’s call them the stories of the week i.e. by the end of the week, what stories do you want to be able to tell, in order to be able to say that you achieved your goal for that week.
Here’s an example, if you’re hiking in Nepal with the goal to arrive at the monastery situated high in the mountains by end of the week, your stories might be: started climbing on Monday afternoon and overnighted at the first lodge along the way. On Tuesday, climbed another 1000 meters and rested in my tent in a camping area. And the last one: set off early on Friday morning from Camp ‘2ndLast’ and arrived at the monastery at 4pm.
This exercise helps you set realistic expectations for the week. Can you really do a 1000 meter climb on Tuesday? What if it rains? As you do this you might realize that your goal for the week (or one of the days) needs to be adjusted. If so, just do it. The purpose is to help you get your goals eventually, not be an infallible planner.
As you do this, you will also notice little details for the day to day tasks. Note these down any way you like, create reminders on your phone if you want.
This planning exercise should take you about half an hour of your time on Monday mornings (or whenever your week begins).
From Tuesday to Friday morning, do daily checkins, which is to say, spend 5 minutes everyday, taking a quick look at your weekly goal and the stories, and updating your tasks, stories, and the goal based on your performance the day before. If you missed your goal of eating vegetables yesterday, go get them today. If you don’t have the time to cook tonight, already think about the vegetarian take-away you could do, simply so that in the evening, when you are tired and hungry you don’t default to your previous habits. These daily checkins start getting us into the habit of doing what we want even when we are tired and distracted.
The secret is to get you into a steady flow of chipping away towards your targets, while keeping it as simple as possible. Remember, when it comes to doing the right thing for you, any progress is meaningful.
Now let’s say you had a regular week and you have arrived at Friday without any major regrets. It’s time to do a Review! This should be another 30 minute exercise, where you look back and see how you did.
Great job, if all your stories are in order. No worries if you missed something.
The biggest benefit of the review is in the following two aspects:
1- Knowing exactly how well you did this week, do you want to adjust your goals? Maybe you’re doing great and you want to set more ambitious goals. Do it! You will have the opportunity to adjust again at the end of next week.
2- How did you achieve the goals? Was it a scramble everyday? Did you have a mid-week slump? Did you feel great when you checked off the first story? This part is about acknowledging the positives and looking at the misses as the areas for improvement. These are the cases where you start making tiny adjustments to make it easier to do what you already want to do e.g. if your goal was to jog a little every day: Put your running shoes in front of the door *with the socks and the running gear* AND buy a little running tracker, so you will have a record of how well you’ve been doing and be incentivised to keep going.
That’s all there is to the system: Plan at the beginning of the week for the weekly goal, do short check-ins every morning to check your progress, and then review at the end of the week. Adjust the next week’s plan according to your progress and your insights from the review.
It is a simple system that allows you to keep going without having to worry about the mountain in front of you that you want to climb; but rather letting you focus on the 1000 meters to the next lodge. That’s easy and doable, and everyday that you do it, you get better at it. Contingencies won’t have catastrophic impact because in the worst case, you will check-in the next day, and adjust accordingly. And the best of all, you can adapt your plan every week.
It is the 1st of January, 2020 as I write this. But whenever it is that you read this, remember that it all starts with “now”. I hope this way of planning and the system that goes with it will be a valuable companion in your journey of realising your dreams.
Try this for three months. Keep what works, discard what doesn’t, and feel free to get in touch if you’d like some support or coaching. I wish you a great start to 2020 and may you reach all of your goals!
Please chime in below if you liked the article or have your own system that has worked for you! I’ll do my best to respond to all comments!
Many thanks to Nicole Pieper for her help in refining this article.
At Inspired in Berlin, our goal is to help as many people as possible to live fully and grow themselves, through cultivating a growth mindset and living in line with lifestyle concepts based on the DeRose Method, combined with our personal and professional experiences.
Disclaimer: This article is based on my personal experience planning my yearly resolutions as well as working with small teams building complex products i.e. I have experienced first-hand how good planning makes the difference between teams who achieve their goals and those who don’t. While plans and systems make a huge difference, the biggest impact comes from your commitment and the effort that goes with it.
