creative maverick

So now it’s 2009 have you been writing down your goals and plans for the year? Did you do the same thing last year? How did that turn out? If the result was a sense of failure and despondency, let’s do something different this year.

I tried a couple of times to work through the process in the book Your Best Year Yet but the process of reviewing what worked and what didn’t in the last year, while fascinating, took a long time. My work on it stretched long into January until I began to drown in a sea of reflection and planning and quietly abandoned the process half-finished.

I need something that doesn’t require quite so much thinking and captures my gut instinct on what I want to focus on for the next year. I know that I’ve written truer plans for my life by scribbling on the back of an envelope for 5 minutes than I achieve with overblown planning processes. So with plenty of creative theft from other brainiacs, here is my 3 step guide to “How to plan your year on the back of an envelope“.

Required time: 5-10 minutes to write but allow time to mull this stuff over and review what you’ve written afterwards.

One

Blogger Christine Kane suggests in this post to choose a single word as your focus for the entire year. Something like freedom, health, courage, wealth, love, creativity, or whatever comes to mind for you. My belief is the word should represent something you want to expand over the next year. When you face a decision, use this word to help you make the right choice.

I’ve chosen “Happiness”. Not because I’m particularly unhappy but because I want to make a shift from things I “should” do to things I enjoy doing. This is even more relevant to my business than it is to my personal life. In reconsidering the coaching packages I offer, the question I am asking now is “What would be the stuff that would be most enjoyable for me to do with clients?”.

Two

Goals. Previously I would write 10-20 goals down and achieve few of them (often achieving a whole bunch of other stuff not on the list). In fact it would be difficult for me to even hold the list of goals in my mind so I’d get to the end of the year and be surprised to discover one or more of them that I’d forgotten.

So, from Steve Pavlina’s newsletter, I am taking his tip for setting just 2 goals - one personal and one professional. My professional goal is this: Make a decent amount of money while having fun. (The “decent amount of money” has a specific number attached that I’m not sharing here). This might sound vague (it’s not exactly a SMART goal) but there’s a lot contained in this simple statement. If I can make that amount of money in one year while enjoying myself thoroughly, then that bodes well for greater success (and of course, happiness) in subsequent years. The personal goal is equally simple.

I’ve written about the problems with goals before so if the thing you want doesn’t lend itself to being described as a goal you can tick off, you can think of it as a directive - something  you want to move towards or have more of, rather than a fixed destination. My personal goal is in this category.

Your 2 goals should make your word from step one a reality.

Three

Take your envelope or sheet of paper and stick it up on the wall somewhere you’ll see it every day. This avoids the game of rediscovering your list of goals at the end of the year to realise you haven’t worked on them at all. Simply being reminded of them everyday can have a powerful effect. When I was a student I noticed I had a better year when I had a year-planner stuck on the wall and could see the whole 12 months in one place with all my key events written on it.

How to live your plan…

Ask daily, what can I do today to support these 2 goals and live my chosen word? Because goals that work are about how you live today, not some point in the future. If you want to lose weight for example, schedule in a bit of a walk today, or take time to make something good that you like, tune in as you eat and stop when you’re full. Remember to keep asking “What has previously worked for me in this area?” rather than “What do experts say is supposed to work?”.

What’s your word for the year? What are your 2 goals (if you’re happy to share them)? Do you have a different back of an envelope planning system? Leave a comment and let me know.

Happy New Year!