New Year, New You?
One year has ended and a new decade is just about to begin. Here’s your fresh start to inspire and motivate you towards those goals to feel more present and in the moment. It’s prime planning time.
Take some time today or tomorrow to strategize how you’ll get there.
In this post, I’ll share four main steps to planning your 2020. It’s meant to be an overview of how to break things down so you’ve got a place to at least get started. If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the thought of looking at an entire year, or feel stuck by the idea of starting, or you want to make sure you’re planning realistically, then read on!
First Step: Review
This involves looking back at your 2019. Reflect on how that year went for you and your household.
Ask yourself questions like:
What worked? What was managed well?
What didn’t go to plan? What needed a plan?
When did you experience a lot of challenge and push back?
What lessons did you learn?
What do you want to repeat? What rituals, traditions, or rhythms did you discover that worked?
What do you want to change or let go of?
Taking the time to reflect will give you clarity about how you want and need to move forward, in a way that feels good.
And this clarity also makes the upcoming prioritizing – step 3 – much easier! It’ll be easier for you to identify your top priorities and make decisions about what to personally work on, what to let go of entirely, or delegate and outsource.
Second Step: Write the list
Unzipping everything kept inside your head can feel so good. Brain dump all your personal and professional goals, important dates, household projects and responsibilities, ideas, and thoughts out on paper, in one place (that is key: this should be in just one place!). Doing this will reduce your overwhelm and stress, clear your head, and give you a realistic picture of just how much you carry.
Need a starting point? Check out my Uncovering Your Overwhelm list.
Once it’s all on paper your brain can relax a little (or a lot!) because you’re not trying to remember and work through all this stuff in your head, and you can take a step back and get honest about where you’re at right now.
As you’ll find in completing Step 1 – the second step makes your prioritizing and decision making easier and allows you to move forward intentionally (meaning you acknowledging what’s to come, making intentional plans for the important things, and not surviving in the everyday).
Third Step: Prioritizing
Now this is a big topic all on it’s own, so I’ll do my best to sum it up!
Without priorities, you’re giving everything equal importance. And that is not good for your sanity or your family.
If everything is equally important you’re going to gravitate towards the easy and familiar things on your to-do list and/or react to stuff as it comes up during the day.
And the truly impactful and important things that you want to get done, and that will help you grow and thrive, will get pushed aside.
So pull your top three priorities out of that massive braindump you did. A maximum of three! Any more than that and things start to get scattered and overwhelming.
Some examples of big picture priorities you might set for the year are:
- Improving communication with your partner to save your marriage
- Planning a return to work after a long stretch of time off
- Streamlining all that goes into running and maintaining a home
- Creating equality in your relationship with your partner
- Targeting where you could provide better balance for your kids
These are big, super important goals.
There is a system to doing this priority setting thing, by the way! It’s something we can uncover in our first conversations as a Thanks, Julia client. So if you’re thinking, “Good lord. There’s no way I can figure out what to do first” then getting in touch with me is your answer.
Fourth Step: Plan out the first three months of 2020 in detail
It is way too overwhelming to plan out your entire year. And it doesn’t make sense to plan in detail too far in advance because things inevitably change, especially if you have kids. We want to leave enough room while setting our goals and organizing our calendar so that we can easily shift and adjust when we need to.
So plan January, February, and March in detail and then create a very overarching outline and general plan for the months to follow.
I like to split the year into quarters. After you plan the first three months (or Q1), decide and plan how to achieve about three major projects or goals in Q2 (April 1 – June 30), Q3 (July 1 – September 30), and Q4 (October 1 – December 31).
That’s all that’s needed for now.
You’ve already chosen three main priorities for your year. Now you’ll break those priorities down into smaller tasks or goals for each quarter. These are steps to achieving your 2020 priorities and those steps will take you closer to meeting or even exceeding what you want out the year.
So using the previous example of, “streamlining all that goes into running and maintaining a home” in 2020, it can be broken down like this:
Q1: You’re going to braindump (and likely research) just what this effort takes to create medium and long term plans for streamlining household management.
Q2: You’ll get all the preventative maintenance and easy-to-manage tasks on a schedule and you’ll get all the outsourcing in place for what’s left.
Q3: You and your household will be adjusting to a new rhythm that may require trials and testing until you figure out what’s just right for everyone.
Q4: With the bigger household upkeep things outsourced and you and your family following routine, you’ll dive into end of year stuff more confidently with less burden and increased amounts of productivity.
BOOM. One goal down.
Now something like that one example can be done and achieved faster. There is so much more to say and talk about when it comes to 2020 planning. But I thought giving you an idea with an overview of the work you can do by yourself over time, could get you started.
But if you’re wanting more support, or you’re seeking an accountability partner, or you want someone to offload these burdens on to Thanks, Julia can help. I want to help you get back to what’s important, so you can feel present and happy. So less of the burden is on you, because it doesn’t have to be.
If you’re waiting for the right moment to do this now is that moment. Thanks, Julia newsletter subscribers just received a 20% promo code to apply to their first month of engagement. Get on the list or email me for more details!
Here’s where we learn from others.
- What’s one big picture priority you have for 2020?
Share what you can! Put your reactions and best practices directly in the comments. Thank you so much for reading, for your candidness, and for helping others by doing so!
In gratitude,
Julia
