How To Plan Your Year

How To Plan Your Year

Do you have no idea where to start to plan your New Year? Do you have a little bit of an idea, but need additional direction? This is my process on how I come up with goals, and how to plan your year!

How to Plan Your Year With My 3 Steps:

Can planning your year really be dialed down to 3 steps? Yes. It takes time in each of these steps, but each step is important in knowing what goals you want to work on, and when they will be attainable to maintain in your schedule.

1. Dream
2. Reflect
3. Plan

When Should I Start Yearly Goal Planning

Ideally, for me, November is when I start my upcoming yearly goal planning. Why November? Because there is a slight lull in the Holidays, and I don’t want it on my plate in December. Once Christmas is done, I have a week where I get back into the mindset of goal setting, but it’s basically setting up systems to maintain the goals. Then January 1st comes, and you are ready to roll!

3 Steps to Plan Your Year

1. Dream. I like to start with the envisioning process because I am a natural dreamer and idea spinner. So I tend to get carried away in this process, but that is where the tactical step of planning helps me rein it in.

Questions to ask yourself when planning your year:

• What do you want to accomplish this year?
• What do you want your new year to feel like?
• How can you take care of yourself more this year?
• What are you looking forward to?
• What trips and vacations do you have planned?
• What do you want to learn?
• What is something you did this year that you want to keep doing?
• What drained your mental load, and you do not want to do again?
• What habits do you need to implement to set you up for your goals?
• What is something you look at everyday in your home and you tell yourself “I need to do that”

2. Reflect. I like to think of things in measurements, and if I don’t know how I spent this year, then I will probably spend the upcoming New Year, and the following years, in a repeat cycle of doing the same things over and over again. In order to know how to plan your year, you have to know how you spent the previous year. Knowing some benchmarks of what worked for you or didn’t work for you, gives your above dream list a direction.

To reflect on how to plan my year, I look through my previous list of goals, go through my planner, and look through my phone photos. As I am looking through my goal list, I am checking things off, and thinking if they still apply. Going through my planner tells me how I spend my time, and my phone photos help jog the memory a little further.

The reflection phase is a time for you to get really honest with yourself about how your emotional and mental energy was spent. Did you achieve your goals? Why or why not?  No shame here. Just be honest with yourself. Most of the time the answer to the lack of goals achieved lies in the lack of sustainable habits that we can actually maintain in our daily life, or we give ourselves too many goals, and get overwhelmed and quit. I’ve been there on both sides, several times.

3. Plan: Now that we have our dream list, and we’ve reflected on what goals worked and no longer apply to our current phase of life, we are going to make a plan for our new year’s goals! I don’t want you to just make a goal list. You have to take it a step further and make the time to commit to your goal, and know when you have time for it, and when you will be too busy.

Get a pen, and pull out the upcoming year calendar, where it shows the full year at a glance. I want you to circle dates, so you can plan your year. What is already planned for the new year that your time is already accounted for?

• vacations
• trips
• birthdays
• races (for me)
• family visits
• baby showers
• annual events and meetings
• work commitments
• sport schedules

Circle those dates on a 2024 calendar. Those circles represent your time already accounted for, so you have to know that when you are plugging In you are going to spend time working on your goals. Look at your year of circles. What months have the least amount of circles? Those are the months that you should be committing to fully focusing on your goals, as it seems life should allow time for it.

Remember!! You don’t need a mile-long list of goals. You can have one goal! As long as you are committed to your one goal and implementing the habits that actually can be sustained in your life, then that my fellow goal sister, is a success!!!

Example of my Goals for 2024

I break up my year in Quarters, because of Hey Goal Sister. It helps me to see on paper when I have the time availability to work a little harder, and when I know I need to pull back and be present in life. I already know now, that April is very busy, and June is always busy for me. That tells me that whatever goals I have for Hey Goal Sister, I need to work on them at the beginning of the year, if I want to make some progress, and I do! And of course, not everything is planned, but this gives me a good enough baseline that I feel confident in.

• I currently have 6 small goals for Q1.
• I have 1 big goal for Q2.
• I have 1 big goal plus a bonus goal for Q3.
• I have 1 small goal and 1 big goal for Q4.

If I know what my year looks like now, then I can break it down into quarters, and that tells me when and where I can plug my goals into. It helps me focus on what Q1 is actually about, and know that I will get to the other goals when the time is right. This is my own accountability to myself because I am the one making the rules.

What do you need to do now? Go PLAN YOUR YEAR!

Get some paper. Get a pen. Get a year at a year-at-a-glance calendar. Get your current planner. Get your past goal list. Block off some time, because you need alone thinking time. And GET TO WORK!

If you have any questions, please email me! I would love to help you plan your goals for the year. heygoalsister@gmail.com