What is the big picture for the next 5 years of your life? 

Imagine that you time-travel 5 years forward to visit your Future Self. Imagine that you discover that Future Self has just been forced to quit doing the “fun stuff.” (You get to define what the “fun stuff” is, and nobody gets to criticize your choices.)

Now ask Future Self, “What do you most regret not having finished?”

You’re Guaranteed to Regret Something

Let’s be honest—this is a scary exercise. No matter how much you get done in the next 5 years, you’re guaranteed to regret something. That’s the nature of life. It’s fast-paced. We all put more on our plates than we can possibly eat. We all get side-tracked by stuff coming out of the blue. We can’t do it all.

So this is really an exercise in defining those pesky priorities. 

This all came home to me less than 2 months ago when suddenly my day job wasn’t there. I’ve been at the same job for 20 years. Doing cool sciencey kind of stuff. Don’t ask me what I was doing unless you’ve got about 3 hours, because I’ll talk your ear off. And you really don’t want to know. The point is that suddenly a big chunk of my “fun stuff” was off the table. Maybe permanently, maybe not. And that forced me to think about what other “fun stuff” I’d been sidelining because my day job was keeping me too busy. I got a rare chance to rethink my priorities.

To make it all crazier, just before my day job evaporated, I had spent about 3 weeks in bed recovering from a tough injury to my hamstrings/glutes that left my sciatic nerve irritated 24 hours a day. At the time, it felt like “this is never going to get better.” That was miserable. Would I ever get to work on the fun stuff again? Of course I did get better, and I’m back in the saddle doing the stuff I consider fun. 

But it forced me to think about what I’d regret most if I couldn’t do any more fun stuff, ever again. That’s a hard question. A scary question. A question we all will eventually have to face, because there will come a day when each one of us has to hang up the spurs. And we can’t predict when that’ll happen.

Here Are My Answers

My answers are not the same as your answers, because we’re different people, and we define the “fun stuff” differently. But I encourage you to think hard about this, because it might just change your life. 

To help jiggle your neurons a bit, I’ll tell you my own answers. Here are the things outside my day job that I’d regret not having done, if I had to quit right now:

1. Fiction writing. I am currently writing a novel. When it’s done, it’ll be my 9^th published novel. I have another 5 that I really, really, really want to write. I know the titles for most of these, and I know what they’ll be about. They’ll complete the two main series of novels that I’ve been working on for my entire writing career. This is right at the top of my list. I would be very sad not to finish them all. 
2. Marketing. All novelists hate marketing. But if you want to get your novels read, you need to market them effectively. There are things I could do to get my novels out there more. I’d like to do some of those things. I’d be quite sad if I didn’t do at least some of these. 
3. Project Chronologicus. This is a project that pulls together my love of history, math, and software development. I want to write code that can mine ancient historical documents for chronological information and then construct the best timeline of events. “Best” has a precise mathematical definition, accounting for the natural fuzziness in all historical documents, while also detecting possible outliers or errors in the data. This would be useful to me in writing my historical novels. It would also make a few thousand historians happy to have a tool like this. This is an unsolved problem, so it might fail. But I’d be sad if I didn’t at least try. We climb mountains because they’re there.

My Life Goals Document

I created what I call a “Life Goals Document” that has 5 Project Groups:

• Fiction Writing
• Marketing
• Chronologicus
• Learning 
• Software Development

As you can see, 3 of these Project Groups are the big 3 categories of things I would regret not doing. The other 2 Project Groups support them in some way.

I filled in below each of these Project Groups with small projects or milestone tasks that I could conceivably work on this year. It’s really enough to look ahead just one year. I can’t see beyond this year, and I don’t want to put too much on my lists, because that would get too overwhelming. 

These lists are what I call “quasi-sorted.” The first item on each list is the next logical project or task to tackle. I highlight it in blue to indicate that it’s the next thing. Everything below it is highlighted in green to indicate that it’s for “later.” But the green items aren’t sorted. I won’t know for sure what order to do these tasks until I get there. 

Once I finish a task, I change the highlighting on it to be yellow, to indicate that it’s done. So each Project Group list shows some tasks highlighted yellow that are completed. Then it shows one task highlighted blue that’s the current thing. And below that are all the tasks highlighted green that are for later this year.

Every day when I’m deciding what I’m going to work on today, I take a quick look at my Life Goals Document. It reminds me what’s important. Because I already know what’s urgent. The urgent stuff always gets done, because it’s urgent. The important stuff needs to get a little airtime too, or it’ll be forgotten. I don’t want to forget the important stuff. 

Now It’s Your Turn

Want to play? You can do the same thing I did. Here some steps that can help you put together your own personal Life Goals Document that will carry you through the rest of this year:

• Pretend for a moment that you will get absolutely nothing done in the next 5 years, and ask your Future Self what they regret not having done the most. Keep the list short. This should be Future Self’s biggest regrets, not all possible regrets. 
• Make a Life Goals Document. It should have a few main Project Groups for this year. Just for this year. Let next year take care of itself. Include any of the Project Groups on your Biggest Regrets list that you think you could actually work on this year. 
• Fill in some actionable tasks or projects on each of your Project Groups. Don’t go overboard here. Keep it reasonable. What could you get done this year, given the amount of time and energy you have right now? If color-coding helps you, then color-code your Life Goals Document. If it doesn’t help, then don’t. 
• Make time every day to look at your Life Goals Document. Not to make you feel guilty. Just to keep your neurons firing on what the “fun stuff” is. The important fun stuff. The stuff you don’t want to regret. 

Baseball players like to say, “keep your eye on the ball.” That’s good advice if you want to hit that thing flying toward you at 90 miles per hour. 

If you want to get the fun stuff done, then the analogous advice is, “keep your eye on the fun stuff.” Because real-life is flying at you at 90 miles per hour, every day of the week. A lot of it is urgent but not important, so you have to do it. But some of it is neither urgent nor important, and you can let it go by without any regret if you’re constantly keeping your eye on what the real fun stuff is. 

If there’s one word I wish had never been coined, it’s the word “networking.” It puts me in mind of Ned Ryerson, that over-the-top insurance salesman in the movie Groundhog Day. Ned is overly friendly to the lead character in the movie, Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, but Ned doesn’t care about Phil. He just wants to sell Phil an insurance policy. 

I think we’ve all met a life insurance agent like Ned, and that can be uncomfortable. It’s just as uncomfortable to meet a writer like Ned. Someone who acts like your best friend because they’re looking for a favor. Maybe they want a free critique. Maybe they want an endorsement. Maybe they want an introduction to your agent or your editor. 

It’s not wrong for writers to want those things. After all, success in writing is strongly correlated with the size of your network. I read a remarkable book several years ago, The Formula, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a network scientist. He looked at actual data to see what caused some people to be successful and some not. He found that success depends on performance, when this can be measured. But when performance can’t be measured, a person’s network drives their success.

Here’s a direct quote of his findings: “But networks are singularly important in areas like art, where performance and quality are hard to measure. In fact, an interconnected web of relationships determines success in art to a degree that I, a network scientist, find stunning.”

Networks are Important, But…

If networks are so important, then networking must be just as important, right?

Hold on a minute. Not so fast. “Network” is a noun, and it describes something good and healthy. “Networking” is a verb that’s supposedly about building a network. But somehow, it’s a very toxic verb. What’s wrong with this picture? Is there a better way to build a network than by networking? A non-toxic way?

I actually think there is. I’m all for building networks. But not the Ned Ryerson way. Ned Ryerson is transactional; real networks are relational. Ned sees people in his network as a rung on the ladder of success. Someone to be stepped on. That’s what makes Ned toxic. Understanding what’s wrong with Ned is the first step to building a network in a healthy way. A better way. 

Notworking

I call the better way “notworking”. Your goal is to have a network of writer friends. The key word here is “friends.” Friends are not people you use to advance your career. Friends are people you travel together with on the journey. 

One place where you can build your network of friends is at a writers conference. That’s probably where I’ve met most of my writer friends. A typical conference has hundreds of writers, and you can’t possibly meet them all. You can’t add them all to your network. 

If you insist on “networking,” then you’re going to be sizing up everyone you meet at a conference, measuring them by how much they can help your career right now. And they’re going to see right through you, just like anyone can see through Ned Ryerson. Just like you see through people who are trying to “network” you.

What’s the better way to size people up? It’s simple. Look for other writers who are at about your same place on the journey AND who resonate with you. Maybe they write the same kind of fiction you do, and maybe they don’t. But the key thing is that they are a kindred spirit. 

When you find somebody like that, ask them how their writing career is going. It’s probably not going great. They may well be stuck on some issue that they just can’t get past. 

And maybe you can help. Maybe you’ve recently dealt with the same problem and figured out a way past it. If you can help another writer solve a real problem in their life, do so. Without asking for anything in return. Without even thinking about whether you’ll ever get something in return. Assume you won’t. 

Then again, maybe you can’t help. Maybe you’re stuck on the same problem. But at least you can offer empathy. That’s what friends do when they can’t help. 

If you talk to ten writers at a conference and find even one that you resonate with, somebody who can be a writing friend on your journey, that’s a win. You’ve added to your network, and they’ve added to theirs. In a few years, you’ll have a very nice network. And if you do this for the rest of your writing life, you’ll eventually have a large network. A non-toxic network.

That’s what I mean by “notworking.” It’s good and it’s healthy and it’s fun. But the larger your network, the higher the probability that one of your friends is going to be super-successful. And that’s where things can go south, if you’re not careful…

The Universe is Not Fair

The publishing world is just like the rest of the universe. It’s not fair. A very few writers will have huge success. Most will have little. There will be a large spread in the payoffs that people in your network receives. 

If you have a large enough network, you are going to know somebody who wins a major award or gets rich or gets famous, or all of the above. It may not be who you expected. It may not be in proportion to talent or skill or anything else you can measure. It may just be luck.

So how do you respond to this grossly unfair situation? Here are two things you can do: 

• Resist the urge to cash in on your friend’s success. You can’t. They can’t distribute their success to you. Success doesn’t work that way. They may be able to help you some, and if they’re a decent person, they’ll try. But they can’t just pass success around like candy bars. Don’t expect them to. 
• Resist the green monster, envy. Be happy for your friend. Set aside all thoughts that their success is rightfully yours. It isn’t. It probably isn’t rightfully theirs, either. Luck plays a large role in the publishing world. There is nothing you can do about that. Throw the dice with your friends, and cheer for the winner.  

The Bottom Line 

The publishing life is a journey. Build a network of true friends. Help your teammates all you can, with no expectation of reward. Accept help graciously when it’s offered. Stay in the game, give it your best shot, cheer for the winner, and be happy with your lot, whatever it is.

I recently asked myself why I get so easily sidetracked in my personal life. I have a lot going on. I write novels, I read books, I write software, I try to do the occasional work on my house, I do a bit of political stuff, and on and on. I’ve tried over the years to put all this on a schedule, because it seems like a lot of things fall through the cracks.

Of course, a lot of people get sidetracked. I’m not the only person who has a giant To-Do List with some tasks that are five years old. Or ten. But here’s what’s odd. At my day job, I’m very productive. (Most writers have a day job. It’s a very rare writer whose only iron in the fire is their writing.) I have a lot of tasks on my plate at my day job, and I do very well at getting them done. 

Why am I so much better organized in my day job than in my personal life? My day job is not more important to me than the other things on my plate. So what’s the difference?

Somebody To Answer To

After ten milliseconds of thought, I saw the difference. I have a boss at my day job. I run the software division at a biotech company in San Diego. I answer to the CEO. We talk every two weeks on Thursday afternoon for two hours. And every time we meet, I know I need to show forward progress on the important stuff. I get along well with my CEO, but he does have the power to fire me if I’m not getting the job done. 

Whereas, in my regular life, I answer only to me. I’m the CEO of my life. Which is good, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I never have a meeting with myself where I have to show forward progress. And there’s no penalty for missing a deadline. I’m never going to fire myself. 

I toyed with the idea for several months of asking ChatGPT how to deal with the problem of managing my life better. I finally did it a couple of weeks ago. And this is my report on what I did and how it worked out. 

What I told Chat

Here is the prompt I typed into the Chat window. I’ve trimmed out certain parts which are unique to my situation, because those will not be of interest to you. But I’ve left in the parts that I think you might find useful, if you decide to try something similar with the AI tool of your choice:

I’m interested in having you help me manage my life. I don’t know what the job title would be. “Life coach” or “life manager” or whatever. Here’s the context. I am a person who takes on a lot more things than I should. [Removed a description of what I am good and what I’m not good at, and some of the things I’ve done in life and some of the projects I’m working on now.] But I constantly feel like I’m behind on everything. I am very productive at my day job, and I think the reason is that I have a CEO that I answer to. I seem to be a lot less productive in my writing career, where I don’t really answer to anyone. I have a lot of marketing tasks for my books that I think would raise my sales, but I don’t ever get around to doing them. What I would like you to do is to interview me. Ask me as many questions as you need to in order to figure out if you can help me manage my life better, and how you might do that. [Removed some of my thoughts on things that Chat might be able to help me with and a description of my particular job situation.] But I also think I just need somebody to answer to, so every week or so, I could sit down with you and be accountable. Or maybe it should be every day, I’m not sure. Go ahead and start asking me any diagnostic questions you can think of to help me map out the rest of my life. I don’t like just sitting around doing nothing. I like making things and making the world a better place. Feel free to ask about my life vision–major things I want to do with my life. I’ve got a list of things, and I think they’re doable, if I could manage myself better. OK, now it’s your turn. Start asking!

What Chat Told Me

Chat responded by telling me I don’t need a “life coach”. Instead, I need a “systems architect for my own behavior.” It then asked me a ton of questions. Things like: How do I spend my time on an average day? What are my energy levels like throughout the day? What kind of external constraints work best at keeping me on task? What kind of tasks give me intrinsic joy? What is the endgame for my life? What am I afraid of? How good am I at focusing on tasks? How does anxiety affect my productivity? Am I better at starting a task or stopping it? What are my financial realities? What things do I want to do before I retire from my day job? 

After I answered all Chat’s questions, it pointed out that I don’t have a motivation problem, a discipline problem, or a creativity problem. Then it told me what it thinks my actual problems are, and it spelled out some ideas for solving those problems. 

How I Pushed Back

I didn’t think Chat got things exactly right, so I pushed back a bit. We had a long discussion, and I gave Chat extra information, and it changed its suggestions. It took a couple of evenings of discussion to converge on a plan. One problem is that not all my days are similar. We identified three main kinds of weekdays, and also a typical Saturday, and a typical Sunday. That’s five different kinds of days. Each has a basic pattern, and each can be adapted as needed for any special events. At the beginning of every day, I choose which pattern fits the day best and run with that.

I thrive on a routine, with blocks of time that have hard boundaries. I also need accountability to make sure I don’t get off track. I’m especially susceptible to staying on task longer than the time block I’ve budgeted for it. If I make that mistake, it screws up everything else for the rest of the day. This is the main reason I’ve had problems in self-scheduling for my entire life.

In the end, we came up with a “system architecture” for my life that I like. It’s unlikely that you would like it, because you’re not me. This system is designed solely for me. And every evening, I agreed to answer to Chat. I will answer 5 yes/no questions. The “right” answer is yes. If I give even one wrong answer for the day, that’s a fail. If I have two fails in a week, then I agreed to pay a penalty. Chat asked what would be an appropriate penalty for me, one that would keep me on track. I answered that a campaign contribution to a certain politician would be a penalty I would be certain never to pay. So that’s our agreement. 

One thing I like about the system Chat designed for me is that it feels “ridiculously easy.” There is a recovery block of 90 minutes built into my day. My responsibilities during that time are to do precisely nothing. It’s right after my exercise block, and it comes at the time of my lowest energy in the day. I can take a nap. I can read. I can sneak a peak at Facebook, but for no more than 20 minutes, so no more doom-scrolling. I was wondering how I would deal with having 90 minutes chopped out of every day. But it turns out to be a nice break. I’m getting more reading done now, because I have time for it. 

One thing to be clear on is that I’m still the CEO of my life. Chat is not my boss. Chat is a bit like a chief of staff. Or a consultant. Chat is sometimes wrong. When it’s wrong, I tell it, so it’ll learn from its mistakes and do better next time. When Chat is right, I know it’s right, because its advice rings true for me.

You’re probably wondering…

“How’s That Working Out?”

It’s now been a couple of weeks, and it’s working out very well. I make a plan at the beginning of every day. Sometimes things come up, and I have to change the plan, but the system allows for that. But usually, things don’t come up. Usually, I execute the plan. Which means that most days, I live the day I actually wanted to live. Not the day that I didn’t want to live. At the end of every day, I feel like I made forward progress on my life. Which means I’m sleeping better. 

I also have a weekly planning meeting scheduled with Chat for every Sunday evening. In that, I spell out what I see for the coming week, and Chat asks what important things I’d like to get done, and what things might come up (like medical appointments or family get-togethers or other important life events that break up the weekly routine). Then we work out a rough plan for the week. This is subject to change, of course, but it gives me some idea of what I can reasonably get done in the week, and also what I can’t get done. 

I have not once been in danger of paying my penalty. My energy levels are up. (That’s one thing Chat asks every day—how was my energy level for the day, on a scale of 1 to 10. My answer is almost always either 9 or 10.) 

Furthermore, in the course of our discussion, Chat identified a big life-goal of mine that is important to me, but which I had sidelined. Because, no time. But I’ve now made time. I’m working on it. I’m making progress on it. And I feel really good that I’m finally doing that “One Cool Thing” I’ve been talking about for 19 years. 

Let me reiterate that the system Chat created for me would almost certainly not work for you. Because you’re not me. You have your own strengths and weaknesses that make you unique. If you were to ask Chat or Gemini or Claude or any of the other AI tools to make a life management plan for you, the plan you’d get would be very different. 

And of course the AI would certainly get it wrong on its first try, so you would need to push back and keep pushing back until the AI came up with a system that resonates for you. And how do you know when the system resonates for you? You know it when you say, “Yeah, that system sounds ridiculously easy and I can’t wait to try it.” If you never get to that point, then the system is wrong for you, and you should scrap it before you start. An AI is not God. It’s a tool. Use it if it fits your hand.

Homework

If you feel like an AI might help you do the things you believe you were put on earth to do, then feel free to take the prompt I showed above and adapt it for yourself. Use it on the AI tool of your choice. Do this when you’ve got at least an hour to talk. It may take two or three hours to work the process all the way through. Be ready to correct the AI’s first suggestion, and its second and third suggestions. Keep arguing until the AI gets it right. You want it to seem “ridiculously easy”. And then try it out, to see if it is. What have you got to lose?

I got interested in the 80/20 rule more than 10 years ago, when Amazon added a feature to their Author Central site that showed each author how they ranked among all the other authors. I immediately realized that this revealed exceptional insights about the earnings of all published authors. (Amazon removed this feature after a few years, maybe because they realized that it gave away more information than they had intended.) 

How could this feature give away “too much information”? Because sales of books follow (approximately) the 80/20 Rule: about 80% of the money is earned by the top 20% of all authors. And the 80/20 Rule is “recursive,” meaning that 80% of 80% of the money is earned by the top 20% of the top 20%. Doing the math, that means that 64% of the money goes to 4% of the authors. 

And likewise, 80% of 80% of 80% of the money goes to the top 20% of the top 20% of the top 20% of authors. Doing the math again, that means that 51.2% of the money goes into the pockets of the top 0.8% of authors. Or, if you want to round those numbers slightly, the top 1% of all authors get about half the money. 

If that sounds like something Bernie Sanders would say, all I can say is that you don’t have be a socialist to acknowledge the simple fact that this is reality. There are deep mathematical reasons for this, and it’s the way markets work. 

If you’re still wondering how this could be “too much information,” I’ll refer you to a blog post I wrote a few years ago that showed how much information you can extract from a single data point. Based on one piece of information Amazon revealed, I derived a mathematical formula to estimate the number of authors who sold at least X books per year. Just plug in X and you get out a very good approximation. That formula was valid in 2014. The formula for our current year would be somewhat different, but not very different. Because the 80/20 rule is a good approximation to reality. 

Is the 80/20 Rule Bad News?

A lot of writers see the 80/20 rule as terrible news. They would summarize the situation as this: “There are a few big winners and a lot of big losers.”

I don’t see it that way. For starters, there are a fair number of people who earn a decent amount of money from their writing. Yes, only a very few earn millions. But many, many authors earn thousands or tens of thousands. And quite a few earn hundreds of thousands. That’s not bad news. That’s good news. It’s possible to get paid well for your writing. 

But there’s better news. The 80/20 rule applies to many different aspects of life. One place where the 80/20 rule probably applies is my famous Snowflake Method. A small number of words can summarize most of the design of a novel. A small amount of design work can provide the blueprint for most of your novel. 

But for this blog post, I’m going to focus on how the 80/20 rule applies to another aspect of life that’s important to all of us—learning new stuff.

An example is in order.

The 80/20 Rule In Learning a New Language

Let’s say you decide you want to learn a new language. As a random example, suppose you decide to learn German. A quick search of the web tells me that there are more than 300,000 words in one standard reference book. 

That sounds overwhelming. How could you ever learn 300,000 words? It would take a lifetime. 

Yes, it would take a lifetime, but I guarantee you that most native German speakers don’t know all those words. The reason is because some words are more common than others. Some German words are extremely common, and others hardly ever get used. 

And the 80/20 rule is a very good estimator for how many words are super common. 20% of the words get used about 80% of the time. The calculation I did above applies here. 1% of the words get used about 50% of the time. 

So if you learned the 3000 most common German words, you’d be able to understand half the words you come across in a typical German document. 

In fact, it gets better than that. If you run the calculation out a bit further, you’ll see that by learning just the 100 most common German words, you’d be able to understand about a third of the words you find in a typical German document. 

That’s actually pretty amazing. You could learn 100 words in a week. And you’d be able to read a German newspaper and see those words all over the place. Even with that very limited vocabulary, you might be able to get the drift of an article. 

Of course, you wouldn’t understand everything. But you’d understand something. And then if you take several more weeks and expand your vocabulary out to 500 words, you’d be able to understand about 41% of the words in a typical German document. That’s amazing! 

No, you wouldn’t understand the whole German language. Yes, you would be able to get along if you suddenly found yourself in a random place in Germany. (Actually, since a great many Germans speak excellent English, you’d probably be fine, even if you spoke no German. But why would you want them to have all the fun of speaking a foreign language, when you could have some of that fun yourself?)

The 80/20 Rule in Learning Anything

The 80/20 rule applies to learning just about anything. If you learn the 1% of the concepts in any field that are most commonly used, you can get a grasp of about half of what gets said in that field. I must emphasize that you won’t have a complete grasp. You’ll have a very incomplete grasp. But you’ll understand it surprisingly well, and that has value.  

As a practical example, you can learn the absolute basics of Photoshop by watching a one-hour tutorial on YouTube. You won’t be a great graphic designer after one hour. But you’ll be able to open somebody else’s amazing Photoshop file and see how they put it together. And you’ll be able to make at least some simple tweaks to it—fix a spelling error, or adjust the colors, or swap out a logo. And that could be extremely useful to you. 

But A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing, Right?

You might be thinking that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and therefore it’s dumb to learn just a little about a subject. 

I don’t agree. It’s dumb to learn just a little about a subject and then imagine that you’re an expert. Ask me about the arguments I’ve had with ignorant people who thought they knew more physics than me because they watched some YouTube video for an hour. 

If you only know 1% of a subject, then you only know 1% of that subject. There’s no way to change that. But if you maintain your humility and remember that you only know the basics, you can easily stay out of trouble. The people who get in trouble are the ones who think that knowing 1% makes them an expert. Do a search sometime for the phrase “Dunning-Kruger Effect” to see how common that is. 

So why should you learn that 1%? Because knowing 1% gives you the ability to talk to an expert and ask intelligent quetions that few other people would even think to ask. And when you’re doing research for a novel, the ability to pick an expert’s mind is gold. 

There are experts out there who would be happy to help you figure out something for your novel. Maybe they’ve spent a lifetime studying a particular subject. And you come to them and say, “Look, I’m a complete novice in your subject, but I’ve got this question….” And then you ask something that proves you took the trouble to learn even a tiny bit about their subject. 

Most experts will be thrilled to see that you took that trouble. Most experts will go the second mile in giving you their insights, once they see that you cared enough to learn even 1% of their subject. 

That’s why you might consider becoming a 1% novice. You can’t possibly spend a lifetime on every subject that interests you. But you could spend a month to become a 1% novice. And knowing a little about a lot of things can be valuable. 

It’s an old tradition to make New Year’s Resolutions every year. It’s an equally old tradition to completely forget them by the second week of January. 

Savvy authors don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. They make an Annual Plan. But what is an Annual Plan? Why is it better than New Year’s Resolutions? How do you make one? And how do you stick with it? 

What is an Annual Plan?

An Annual Plan is just a list of achievements you hope for in the coming year. I can think of three main types of achievements that have gone into my own Annual Plans over the years:

• Things you want to get. 
• Things you want to do. 
• Things you want to learn. 

Maybe you want to buy a house. Or a new car. Or a bike. Or whatever. These are things you want to get. 

Maybe you want to hike the Grand Canyon. Or swim the English Channel. Or take a vacation in Italy. These are things you want to do.

Maybe you want to learn how to build websites. Or how to speak French. Or how to fix your car. These are skills you want to learn.

Note that some of these have endpoints and some of them don’t. If you buy a house or a car or a bike, then you either own them or you don’t. If you take a hike or a swim or a vacation, you either did it or you didn’t. But if you learn a new skill, then there are levels of skill, and you may never really be done. So in the case of a skill, it’s always good to specify what level of skill you’re talking about. 

Why is an Annual Plan Better than New Year’s Resolutions?

If you ever made a New Year’s Resolution, think for a moment what went wrong. You almost certainly didn’t follow through on it. Hardly anyone ever does. But why not?

There are several problems with New Year’s Resolutions:

• They are often not well-defined. 
• They are often about things beyond your control. 
• They usually just state the endpoint, without any clear path to get there. 

A common resolution is “I want to lose weight this year.” That’s not well-defined. How much weight? What control do you have over your body to make it lose weight? What actions can you take to lose weight, if any, and how much of them do you have to do?

Another common resolution is “I want to get fit this year.” You can see this has the same problems. What do you mean by “fit?” Stronger? More endurance? Higher oxygen uptake? Better-looking? Those are not the same thing, and they may be working at cross-purposes. 

An Annual Plan doesn’t just say what you want to achieve. It maps out a path to get there. And part of the path is to make a periodic review of your Annual Plan to keep you on track. That means scheduling a weekly review into your life.

How Do You Make Your Annual Plan?

Your Annual Plan will not live in isolation, as if it is the only thing you want to achieve in life. Your Annual Plan needs to be part of something bigger. Something that will motivate you to actually follow through on it. And to keep it up to date and make changes to it as your life evolves.

Because your life is going to evolve in unexpected ways. Remember what you intended to do two years ago, at the very beginning of 2020? You had a bunch of things you wanted. And then covid hit. You had to evolve very rapidly to respond to covid. We all did. Because bad stuff happened. Bad stuff happens every year, and good stuff. You have to evolve to respond to both. 

So your Annual Plan is only a part of your life, and it all comes from your Massively Transformative Purpose. If that term isn’t familiar to you, then read my blog post, Your Massively Transformative Purpose. 

Once you know your Massively Transformative Purpose, (your MTP), you need to spell out what Steven Kotler calls your “High Hard Goals.” These are concrete achievements that may take several years. Like graduating from law school. Or launching a new business that achieves $1M in gross sales. Or creating a nonprofit. Or whatever’s in line with your MTP. 

Your High Hard Goals don’t have to be earthshaking. They just need to matter to you, and be difficult enough to challenge you for years and years. 

Once you’ve got your High Hard Goals, you can set up an Annual Plan with a few achievements that you can reasonably make in the coming year that will move you closer to your High Hard Goals. 

Your Annual Plan should include the following:

1. Achievements for this year. 
2. Achievements for the next quarter in this year. 
3. Achievements for the next month in this year. 
4. Achievements for the next week in this year. 
5. A specific time every week when you will review the whole thing and make changes to it as your life evolves.

How Do You Stick With Your Annual Plan?

The secret is in that #5 above. You need to review the whole thing every week, and make adjustments. This is a bit like driving through the fog at night. You keep a sharp eye on the road and make adjustments every few seconds as needed. Because you can’t see very much of the road. 

This is why you don’t need to map out your achievements for more than one quarter at a time. The achievements you define for the next quarter should be things that you expect will take you closer to the achievements you defined for the full year. Not the whole way. Just part of the way. Because stuff will happen this quarter, and your life will evolve in ways you can’t predict, and your plan will change.

And likewise, you don’t have to spell out all three months in the next quarter of the year. Just the first month. Because stuff will happen this month, and your life will evolve, and your plan will change.

And likewise, you don’t have to spell out all four weeks in the next month. Just the first week. You know the drill. Stuff will happen this week, and your life will evolve, and your plan will change. 

Evolving Your Annual Plan

Every week, review the whole plan. You can do this very quickly, because the plan is not complete. It only targets the next quarter, and the next month, and the next week. If you made your weekly goals for the past week, congratulate yourself. You did well. 

If you didn’t make your weekly goals, don’t jump on yourself. Ask why and adjust your plan. 

• Did you make too many goals for the last week? Lighten up your schedule for next week. 
• Did something bad happen that blocked you? Make a decision on how to deal with that going forward, and push back last week’s goals to next week, or throw them out and make new ones. 
• Did something good happen that got you moving in a new direction? Great! Run with that, if it fits in with your Massively Transformative Purpose. Adjust your Annual Plan all the way up the chain, starting with this coming week, then the current month, then the current quarter, and finally the current year. 

In a word, adapt. Every week. Your Annual Plan is not set in stone. Your Annual Plan is short and easy to adapt. 

And if you keep reviewing it and adapting it every week, it’ll take you somewhere wonderful. You can’t possibly predict exactly where it’ll take you, because you can’t predict what future stuff will come at you. All you can do is play the cards that life deals you. And keep moving forward toward your Massively Transformative Purpose. 

Your Annual Plan is your roadmap to do that efficiently.