On annual planning your life.
Applying corporate frameworks for personal gain.
Hello, friend. What a week, and everything is still happening.
Today's newsletter is the result of me going “hey, all my friends are setting goals for the year, and a significant part of my job is setting goals for the year... can I help my friends by teaching them some business-world terminology and structure?” and my friends going “hell yeah!”.
So — if you, like my friends, are thinking about what you want out of 2021, the following VERY LONG guide may be for you. Strap in.
Caveats
The examples in this guide mostly focus on personal, rather than work, goals and workstreams. But it's adaptable.
Much of this is likely written elsewhere, differently, and better. This is a framework that makes sense to me.
And finally — you may not be a planner, or have decided that 2021 is a great year to not set goals. That's cool. Delete this one and I'll see you again in a few days.
Okay — still with me? Let's do this.
The guide
So, friend. I hear we're interested in using the tools of corporate capitalism to organize our time and improve our lives. In this guide and template, we’ll outline a vision for 2021, then break that vision down into an actionable plan for what we’ll prioritize. Shall we? Onward!
Vision
First, set a vision for the year. I came up with two options for the format; examples below — you could also, like much of what's to follow, come up with your own. I'd advise you, in any case, to think big, be specific, and toot your damn horn. [Toot.]
Format option 1: The headline of your “Life CV”. You might not accomplish all of this in 2021.
Example: “Sarah is a Principal Product Manager who has been recognized with multiple industry awards for innovation, accessibility, and inclusion. She’s a great wife and mom, a world traveler, supportive friend, avid reader, and crafter.”Format option 2: The first paragraph of your 2021 holiday letter. Imagine you’re in the future looking back at the year as you write this.
Example: “Hello family! What a wonderful year. Sarah got promoted to Principal Product Manager, and works with a supportive team of kind humans. Her husband and kids are thriving even though we stayed home for the first nine months of the year. Sarah took time for herself: long walks, knitting gifts for friends and to donate, learning new skills (spinning and weaving) and improving some old ones (sewing and dyeing). Nobody got COVID. Sarah’s wardrobe is gorgeous and the whole family is working on supporting small & local businesses. Sarah finally saw a dermatologist and the acne that has bothered her for the last 20 years is finally under control! Her hair looks great almost all the time.”
Themes
What high-level themes do you want to influence this year? These are measures of how well other things are going. Think: outputs, trailing indicators.
Examples:
Happiness
Health (mental, physical, emotional)
Success (whatever this means to you)
Personal growth (career, learning, wisdom, education)
Program areas
Program areas are things you can materially affect with your effort. Think: inputs, leading indicators. Include things here that you have to spend time on, as well.
Examples:
Strength, flexibility, stamina
Family happiness
Rest (could include TV)
Food / cooking
Work
Travel (ha!)
Learning
Hobbies
Time well spent (e.g. less screens / social media, if that's your definition)
“KTLO” (keeping the lights on — this is stuff you have to do like work, pay bills, take out the trash. It all takes time.)
“Oncall” (being the first responder to emergent life stuff — taking the cat to the emergency vet when she won’t stop throwing up, just to pick a detail that’s close to home)
Setting & tracking goals
Set goals
Let’s set SMART goals. These are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, if exercise is a theme for you, you might take a goal “Run a mile without stopping by 9/1/2021.” Let’s see how this goal is SMART.
“Run a mile without stopping” = specific. (Non-specific: “Get in better shape.”)
“A mile” = measurable. (Non-measurable: “A long way.”)
“A mile without stopping” = achievable. (Goals should be ambitious and achievable. This will vary by person! Not achievable: “Run a marathon at an 8mph pace by the end of January even though I haven’t been training for it.”)
“Run a mile” = relevant. (Not relevant: “Get my partner to run a mile.” “Spend twelve hours researching running shoes.”)
“By 9/1/2021” = time-bound. (Not time-bound: “eventually”.)
Other examples:
Complete X course by 6/1/2021
Read X books by 12/31/2021
Grow my savings by Y% by 12/31/2021
Note: you don’t have to state how you will achieve your goal. Will you grow savings by investing in the stock market? Cutting expenses by cooking instead of eating out? Getting a higher-paying job? Moving to an area with a lower cost of living? That’s for the Workstreams step!
Track progress
Decide how you will measure progress towards your goals. Like — literally, how will you keep track, and how often (and in what forum) will you assess how things are going? Depending on how much you trust computers, paper, and/or yourself, you could use…
A planner
Calendar reminders
Weekly / monthly calls with friends
Workstreams / projects
We’re starting to put it together.
Workstreams are a way to organize related tasks that all build toward a goal. (You can think of these as “projects” if that’s helpful.) Workstreams may map to multiple themes: the workstream “read books” can be associated with the themes “hobbies”, “time well spent”, “rest”, or even “family” if you’re reading together. This is where you start to connect your themes and program areas to actual actions you’ll plan and execute.
Examples:
Read books
Learn X skill
Get promoted
Exercise
Rest
Create (Knit / sew / weave / spin / etc.)
Cook
Take a course
Tasks
Tasks are the building blocks that make themes, program areas, and workstreams actually happen. They’re something you can generally do in one sitting. You may be able to cross off more than one of these on a productive day. If a task has more than one part or feels unwieldy or insurmountable, break it down further into its component tasks. “Get a graduate degree in Marriage and Family Therapy” is not a task. “Identify the top 5 graduate schools I want to apply to” is a task.
Examples:
Enroll in a course
Schedule a career conversation with my boss
Buy comfortable walking shoes
Go on a walk
Get a weekly babysitter so I can have date night / personal time
Buy a pattern / yarn
Organize supplies / a making space
Our good and important friend Prioritization
Let’s be very real. Even as a super-person you can’t do everything. So — what are the most important things to you? As you fill out the template, think about “stack-ranking” the lists you make in each section, meaning the most important stuff is at the top. You can change your stack-ranking as you go, or if you blow through all your goals early in the year, you can come back to the list to pick up more! Go you.
Risks
Once you've outlined your goals, identify risks that may impact your ability to achieve them. These will generally be unpredictable factors outside your control. Where possible, make a plan to mitigate each risk. Where mitigating a risk would not be possible, think ahead to how you might pivot and pick a new goal. To continue our running example, there's a risk that you'll injure yourself, which will interrupt your training and make it impossible to hit your goal. To mitigate this risk, you could: (1) stretch before and after runs, (2) make sure you're wearing the right footwear, (3) ramp up your training responsibly, etc. Of course, you can do all these things and still injure yourself — so how would you pivot if you were unable to hit your running goal? Would you take a yoga goal instead? Switch to a meditation goal until you're well enough to resume training?
The template
Go ahead and copy/paste this into your own notes, or write it out on paper.
Start by filling out this section of bullet-points; then we’ll “groom” what you write into an organized table. We should come up with a less-creepy word for that. Organize! We’ll organize.
Vision
Fill in
Themes
Fill in
Don’t forget to prioritize
You might not focus as much on the stuff down here
Program areas
Fill in
Fill in
Are you prioritizing?
Workstreams
Fill in
You can probably do quite a few of these
Don’t be shy, dump ‘em all out
But then prioritize
Tasks
You’re going to have a ton of these; don’t try to write them all down.
But it’s fine to dump out anything that comes to mind or that you don’t want to forget.
Goals (remember to be SMART!)
Fill in
It’s fine to include goals you know you’ll achieve; it’ll be fun to cross them off later!
How you’ll measure progress
Have a mechanism for each goal, ideally.
Now — after you've stack-ranked the above (remember: put the most important ones first in the list), create a workstreams table. Each workstream should map to 1+ goals, program areas, and themes. Each one will have one or more tasks standing between you and completion.
You can make this kind of table in Excel or other spreadsheet software, write it on paper or in your planner, or use a task-tracking or note-taking webapp (the table above, which is secretly a database! — a topic for another newsletter — was created in my new BFF Notion, with a hat tip to Casey Newton).
One of my low-key 2021 goals is to use fewer parentheticals. We’re obviously not there yet.
Next steps
Now, it's up to you to schedule out your tasks, use your goal-tracking mechanisms to measure progress, and achieve what you want in 2021.
I believe in you.
Responses go straight to me, so reply to let me know what you think of this. (A couple of my friends hate the idea. I see y’all. We’re good.)
Sincerely and as always, until we meet again, your friend on the internet,
Sarah
Big fan of the comment thread - I wanted to comment on your last post, "Yay, Barry!" Love the newsletter, Sarah!
Hey, it's a comment thread!
What'd you think of this? Useful? Insipid? Not enough GIFs?