Like most people, I seldom keep a New Year’s Resolution. Last year, I stopped making New Year Resolutions. Instead, I planned my year, and got a much better result. I succeeded in getting about 70% of my intentions done. How cool is that!
I thought I’d share my process:
- Harness your Mind
- Ask yourself Four Questions
- Create an Overview Plan of your Year
Harness your Mind
Get all the thoughts that are cruising around your brain onto a single page. To do this, you can make a spider diagram, or a list, or just scatter words over the page. Work in a way that suits you. As you can see I am a spider diagram person.
Then sort all these thoughts into High (H) and Low (L) with H and L labels. Both are important, but the H things will require time, energy and focus. This means they will need to be plotted on a year planner (see below: Create an Overview Plan of your Year).
On another page, make a T diagram (see example in photo below) and list the H things in one column and the L things in the other column.
By now, you can see your thoughts in a more organised way. You can see which things are going to need a lot of time and energy. You have something tangible to work with. It’s at this point that you begin working out time frames for those things that will need your focus and in depth attention. You will plot this information on your Overview Year Planner.
To dig deeper, you might like to do the next activity. Or not. You choose.
Ask yourself Four Questions
Here, you can use some of the information from the previous exercise. But the questions here, also draw out the emotional stuff. Here are the four questions.
- What do you want more of?
- What do you want less of?
- What do you want to make time for?
- What do you need to stop doing?
Keep your answers. At the end of the year you can use the lists to evaluate your achievements. Here are my January 2022 answers to the questions. I ticked off the things I accomplished in January 2023. It felt very satisfying.
When it came to the end of 2022, I still hadn’t stopped my addiction to reading newspapers, especially The Guardian. But I had gained clarity of purpose, reduced overwhelm and anxiety, played, made healthy lunches and stopped leaking money. And the fact that I achieved quite a few things that I’d set out to accomplish (not all, being a human after all) felt so, so good.
Having drawn out all the above information, I selected some of the big things, the things that needed time, energy and focus and set them out on an Overview Plan of the Year.
Create an Overview Plan of your Year
By using an overview year planner, you can start putting a time frame around some of the bigger H things you want to do. So for example, if you want to make a pond for wild life in your garden, you can figure out when might be the best time to do that.
Plotting on a overview year planner allows you to put a big project aside until later. You can concentrate on present projects or tasks (e.g. UK Tax Returns, due 31 January), knowing that large projects are safely marked and planned for. They are on a piece of paper, all in one place for easy reference. This reduces overwhelm caused by thinking about everything at once.
Overall, I have found that by doing the exercises outlined above, I get a clear view of the year. I feel more in control. The different parts of my life are catered for and my plans beckon my energy and focus. And having it all on paper, makes me feel more secure, as I have something to refer to during the year. It makes it easier to:
- remember and stay the course
- not hop about
- see your achievements at the end of the year (pat yourself on the back!) and
- recognise the things you were unrealistic about for better planning next time.
Good Luck!
Let me know what you think. You can email me at [email protected] or write a comment.