Want to know how to plan for the year ahead. A new year is a great opportunity to think about your future and what you want to achieve. Keep on reading to find out how to plan for the year ahead.
HOW TO PLAN FOR THE YEAR AHEAD
1. Review your year so far
Before you start to plan for the year ahead you should review the current year (or the last year if you are planning at the beginning of the year). It is easy to forget about what has happened over a year and consciously being aware of what happened over the year can help you plan even better for the year ahead.
Some questions you can ask yourself as part of your review are:
- Did I achieve all of the goals I set?
- For the goals you achieved ask yourself – What was critical in helping me to achieve that goal
- For the goals you didn’t achieve ask yourself – Am I able to identify why I didn’t achieve my goal? Is this goal still important to me and do I want to achieve it in the year ahead?
- What were my highlights of the year?
- What were my lowlights of the year?
- What did I achieve that hadn’t been a part of the plan?
- What lessons did I learn that I want to continue to be aware of in the new year?
2. Complete a Wheel of Life
I love the Wheel of Life and it is a great tool to use just before you create a plan for the year ahead. A Wheel of Life allows you to quickly assess how you feel about the different aspects of your life. If you aren’t familiar with the Wheel of Life you can learn more about it here .
Essentially the idea is to choose 8 aspects of your life and then rate how happy/satisfied you are in each area. Doing this before you create your plan for the year ahead will enable you to identify the parts of your life that need attention (and a plan).
3. Set your goals for the year ahead
Your review and Wheel of Life should help you to have a real understanding about what happened over the last year and your current situation. So now it is to start looking at the year ahead. Before you can create a plan for the year ahead you first need to set your goals for the year ahead.
With the support of the Wheel of Life you should create a number of goals for the year ahead. Ideally you want to have goals across the different aspects of your life. You don’t have to have a goal for every area, but ideally you want to have goals covering a few different areas. This will help you have a balanced approach, rather than everything be focused on one aspect of your life.
4. Create your plan for the year ahead
Once you’ve set your goals you can star planning for the year ahead. For each goal you want to first thing of all of everything you can do to achieve the goal. This will mainly be actions you need to take, but it might also include things you need to learn, people you need to ask for help from etc.
Once you’ve got a list of actions you can take you, you need to start turning that list into an action. Firstly, you’ll need to identify what actions rely on a previous actions and what actions can happen at any point of time. Actions that rely on another action being taken will need to be put into a sequence and this will help when you create a timeline for your plan.
Once you are happy with the actions and you understand how they work together you can start to create a timeline. This is the difference between a to-do list and an action plan. A to-do list is just a list of things to do. Whereas a plan will tell you what you need to do, but also tells you when.
For each goal you should have a timeline with actions plotted on it. Bringing them all together will help you to see the whole plan for the year ahead.
5. Identify your milestones
Setting goals and creating a plan for the year ahead is a great thing to do, but a year is a long time, and it is easy to go off track, so it is important to identify milestones.
Milestones will be different for different goals. For example, if you have a quantifiable goal, such as, save £20,000 for a house deposit. Then it might be that in June you would have the milestone of having saved £10,000. Whereas if your goal is to publish a book you might have milestones such as finish the proposal or send book proposal to 20 publishers.
That’s it! You now know how to plan for the year ahead.
A lot can happen in a year and by taking the time to plan ahead you can ensure you are giving yourself the best opportunity to achieve your goals and have an amazing year.
In the comments below I’d love to hear what one of your goals for the year ahead is.
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