Yearly planning to support goals

- A common time management need is long-term planning in support of big yearly goals. These yearly goals can be career related, such as working into a promotion, or business related, such as reaching previously unachieved sales numbers, or even personal, such as running a marathon for the first time. In all these examples effective time management is required. In this video I'll provide a very simple breakdown of how to take large goals and plan for them in your calendar so that you can achieve them.

If you want a more detailed walkthrough of the goal setting and goal planning process I recommend you look at my course here in the library called Achieving Your Goals. Of course, the process begins with having your goal in mind. What is it that you want to accomplish in the next year or so? Make a note of your goal. To illustrate the process I'll use the example of writing a book. Just insert your goal into the steps I discuss. First, start with the end date.

What this means is we're going to determine the date by which we want to accomplish the goal. Let's say that I am starting on January 1st and by December 31st, the end of this year, I want to have my book complete and ready to go the printer and to go to online publishers. I'm going to schedule out that entire day, December 31st, for finalizing the book. Step two, determine and schedule the midway point. So since today is January 1st, the midway point is going to be July 1st.

What do I need to have accomplished by July 1st? Answer that question for the goal that you have in mind. For this book I'm writing the midway point might be that I have the first draft of the book 100% complete. The next step is I'm going to determine the 1/4 point. In other words, what do I need to accomplish between now and that date that I've put in my calendar of July 1st? So we're looking at around the 1st of April. What do I need to have accomplished? In my example the result is fairly straightforward.

I need to have completed writing about 50% of the book. Next, I'm going to cut it in half again, or to make it easier, we'll just say the one month point. At the end of one month where do I need to be? I might say, I have the first chapter written or something like that. Time to break it down one more time. What needs to be done this week? Perhaps I say I create a rough table of contents. To best follow through on this step I'll want to gather the idea and then process it, as I teach in Time Management Fundamentals.

During processing I'll schedule the time it takes to complete that table of contents. Likely between a few hours and a full day. That's good to get things rolling, but we're not quite done. The final step in this planning process is to fill in the blanks. This means determining how many hours I need to work in the week leading up to the first draft. I want to schedule time for that in my calendar. I'll also want to determine what needs to happen between the midpoint and the end point.

So I might budget some time for that in my calendar as well. This is much easier to do, because I have a rough framework built into my schedule for the coming year. Repeat this simple planning process for every yearly goal that you want to accomplish. Just be careful that you don't try to accomplish too many things at once. You're more likely to succeed when you can be very focused on just a few most valuable goals.