Making an annual plan

I recently chanced upon an article that talked about planning an ideal year. I have found my life meandering recently and this article resonated with what I wanted to do. It basically encourages you to make a plan for the year and then taking steps to fulfil the plan. 

Making the plan involves listing down the various aspects of your life that are important to you like work, family, financials, hobbies, spirituality etc. and then writing down your annual goals for each of these aspects. The key is that each of these goals should be measurable and time bound. Then you plan a month at a time breaking down the annual goals and setting goals for the coming month. You conduct periodic reviews to see how you’re doing. I highly recommend reading the article.

Many of us go about life in a completely reactive manner. We let things happen to us and then act accordingly. This is a poor way of living, in my humble opinion. I believe that each of us must aspire to live a life that is dictated by what we want to do with it. This may seem obvious but funnily, we don’t do things this way. We go about life in an ad hoc manner - typically juggling work and family without doing anything else about the other aspects of life that we consider important. The excuse is typically that we don’t have the time.

After many years, when we look back to see what we have achieved, we might not feel very good about ourselves. We might feel that we have prioritised completely wrongly and we could have done much more with our lives than make progress only on the work, family and financial sides.

We, as human beings have so much more potential to achieve things. We need to identify what we truly care about and then work towards making progress on those fronts, year by year, month by month, day by day. Only then can we look back and feel good about the life we’ve lived.



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