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Christoph Magnussen
I make teams collaborate faster to help leaders scale their businesses by transforming #90iesIT into #futureofwork ...and I love this shit

Alright: Time To Set Your TOP 5 For The New Year.

One of my most important habits is a yearly retreat with myself to set my mantra for the year and my top five goals. I did it now for 10 years in a row and involve my wife in this process to align our work and life for the new year. Whereas my mantra is more like the overall theme that guides through the year, the TOP 5 help to guide through the days and weeks.

How do I find these top five goals among all the stuff we would like to do and how to stick to them? Here is what I do:

  1. Find a quite spot before the first workweek starts and make a list with all the potential goals and things you want to do and achieve. Brainstorm for 10–20 minutes as long as ideas come. You can use them later as your goal archive. Bullet points in combination with a short comment and scribble works best for me.
  2. Make a wise choice of your TOP 1 goal the one that you need to achieve no matter what. It’s hard sometimes to prioritize but it’s important to set a focus for the year. You cannot achieve everything.
  3. Do the same for the TOP 4 to 5 by asking yourself how important each task is and how it feels if you have achieved them at the end of the year.
  4. Make sure you involve both personal and business goals. There is only one life. It’s nonsense to separate them and you cannot maintain two TOP 5 lists or at least you would cheat yourself about priorities.
  5. Make sure each TOP can be measured or checked of. If not, it’s not a goal.
  6. Most important: involve the TOP 5 in your every day work life and routines. The yearly TOP 5 help you to derive daily top tasks. By this you will stay on your track throughout the year and achieve your most important tasks.

I’ve kept all my old notebooks in large boxes and love to look through them every now and then.

One of my TOPs this year is to produce more (blogs and movies). So if you like what you read you can follow me via Twitter or Facebook. If you need a notebook to brainstorm and keep track of your TOP 5, I can recommend the field notes pocket books or the Zencover that I designed myself for staying focused.