How to Plan Your Yearly Goals Without Getting Overwhelmed
Keep reading this post to learn:
⋒ What a Yearly Vision Meeting is
⋒ How to use the Yearly Vision Meeting to set your goals
⋒ How to make sure your goals are in alignment with your life priorities
I often get asked how I manage to accomplish so many goals year after year and it’s because I follow a system – I’m not a superhuman, I’m just intentional and strategic.
I don’t choose random goals and I don’t just throw stuff at the wall hoping it’ll stick.
I choose goals that align with the vision I have for my life, I create action plans that take the guesswork out for each goal, and I schedule my goals in a way that honors what’s happening in my life so that I don’t ever feel stretched too thin or burned out.
I know the thought of planning out an entire year for some people feels daunting and they’re just like what, how???
Well, I’m the type of person who finds peace and comfort in planning the year out – but of course, I keep in mind that our schedules and routines are tools, not chains and things can and probably will be moved around.
I mean when I brainstormed my 2022 goals toward the end of 2021, I had no clue I was going to be pregnant and giving birth in 2022 – so obviously I had to shift a lot of my 2022 goals because my season of life changed.
When I create my plan for the following year, I don’t go into it with a set in stone mindset. Instead, I like to think of it as creating a blueprint to help guide the next 12 months.
So this blog post is going to be really practical – I am going to share with you exactly how I plan my goals for the next year with the hope that you can take what I do and make it work for you!
I have what I call a Yearly Vision Meeting – it’s part of The Hustle Sanely Planning System and if you’ve been in the community for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about it. It’s where I set aside time to sit down and cast vision for the year that’s coming up.
I use the word “vision” a lot – I want to talk about what it means real quick because I think it can feel vague or overwhelming if you don’t understand it.
Vision tells us where we want to go and our goals are the vehicles that get us there. In other words, goals help us live out our vision.
Your vision is what you want your life to look and feel like. How you want to show up. It’s not complicated so don’t make it complicated, lol.
I usually do my Yearly Vision Meeting in November – mostly because I like to chill in December.
To start my Yearly Vision Meeting, I reflect on the previous year.
I look at the goals I set for the year and reflect on which ones I accomplished, which ones I didn’t, and why or why not.
Then I think about the coming year.
First, I like to look at a yearly calendar (I use Year at a Glance one in the Peacefully Productive Planner) and jot down any major events that are going on throughout the year so I can see which months are fuller and which months have more margin.
The kinds of things I make note of are:
~ Work trips
~ Vacations
~ Work deadlines/projects/launches (so like I know we launch planners every September and I know we open the BFF Membership once a quarter)
~ Any important dates like big birthdays, anniversaries, baby due dates, etc.
Obviously I don’t know all of these before the year starts but what I do know, I fill in.
So now I’ve reflected on the previous year, made note of important known events for the coming year, now it’s time to create my goals.
I’ve been goal setting for a long time – I’m an Ennagram 3 so goal setting is kind of one of my love languages, ya know?
But for real, I’ve been setting goals since I was like 20 so at this point, I’m pretty good at knowing my capacity for how much I can do in a year without feeling like I’m spreading myself too thin.
I view my goal setting in 2 categories: personal and professional. I think that works well for me because I’m an entrepreneur and own my own business. I don’t have anyone setting goals for me at work – I have to create them.
I use the categories in the Peacefully Productive Planner to help me brainstorm goals:
~ Work (this is professional)
And these are the personal categories:
~ Relationships & family
~ Health & wellness
~ Mental health & self-care
~ Finances & giving
~ Home & living spaces
Here’s the thing – you don’t need a goal for every category. The point of goal setting is to help you get closer to your vision – you don’t just wanna set goals to have goals. Because then you’re probably not going to care about them, which means you probably aren’t gonna show up for them, which means you’re probably gonna feel guilty or like a failure for not achieving them.
We put so much self-imposed pressure on ourselves so let’s try not to do that by setting arbitrary goals that we don’t actually care about, okay?
Some years I have 12 goals and some years I have 3 goals. There isn’t some rule book that says you have to have a certain number of goals every year. You get to decide that. Pretty cool, right?
And another thing – sometimes as the year goes on, I add or take away goals. If I think of a goal that feels important to me and aligns with my vision and that I have the capacity for, I’ll add it. If a goal doesn’t wind up making sense for my life or it no longer aligns with my vision, I ditch it.
Now this isn’t me saying I ditch goals that feel hard. Some goals are going to feel hard. This is me saying I ditch goals that don’t actually align with my vision.
Once I have my goals picked out, I schedule them based on the events that I wrote down on the year-at-a-glance page I mentioned earlier.
The Hustle Sanely Planning System teaches us to have a Focus Goal every month. Now that doesn’t mean you have to have a new goal every month and it doesn’t mean that you can only have one goal a month – it just means that it’s helpful if you focus on giving one goal your best time and energy at a time so you can actually make progress on it rather than trying to chip away at 5 goals at once and actually make no progress on any of them, you feel me?
The way I do this in my life is choosing one personal Focus Goal each month and one professional Focus Goal each month.
Sometimes my professional Focus Goal will carry over into a second or third month if it’s a high-capacity goal like launching a course or prepping for planner pre-order.
Same thing for personal goals – if they’re bigger goals, that require more capacity, they can carry over into multiple months.
So for example, if I know that Adam and I have a 2 week long trip planned for June, I am not going to say that I want to launch a new course in June… because that is called overstuffing our calendar and that is what causes us to spread ourselves too thin and burn out.
What works well for me in this season is choosing 2-3 medium to large professional goals a year and 2-3 medium to large personal goals a year and then sprinkling in smaller goals that I might think of as the year goes on.
And keep in mind that what I consider medium or large, might be small to someone else or vice versa. No one knows your capacity but you. Don’t try to create and schedule goals based on other people’s capacity.
I know y’all love a concrete example so let me give you one.
I already know that one of my bigger goals for work in 2024 is to launch a business course – I have that tentatively on my calendar to launch in March of 2024, because that’s where it made the most sense based on other work projects that are happening and life events that are happening throughout the year.
So my Focus Goal in February will probably be to create the course and my Focus goal in March will probably be to launch the course.
Now, other things are going to be going on in my business during February and March but they’re recurring things that I’m used to doing – like creating podcast episodes and creating content for the BFF Membership.
So that’s how I go about planning my goals for the year without getting overwhelmed. I create and schedule a handful of personal and professional goals and then leave margin to sprinkle in smaller goals that might pop up as the year goes on.
One of my favorite quotes when it comes to goals is “be clear on the goal but flexible with the process of getting there.”
Speaking from experience here, I’d way rather take longer to accomplish my goal and go about it in a way that prioritizes my well-being and relationships over running myself into the ground to accomplish a goal a few months or a year faster but feel like total burned out crap by the time I made it to the end of the goal.
Okay y’all that is what I’ve got for you today – how to plan your yearly goals. I hope this episode was helpful and I can’t wait to go into 2024 with every single one of you!
Join us for our Best Year Ever Workshop!
The Best Year Ever Workshop is a free 3-day workshop that I host to help you set yourself up for the best year ever 🎉
I walk you through tips for setting up the pages behind the “5 Keys” tab in your planner!
Loved this blog post? Tune into the full podcast episode below!
