Achieve Your Goals in 2025
Using a segmented planning approach to focus yourself in the right direction and get more things done
2024 is coming to a close. It’s time to wind down and spend the remainder of the year with friends and family for the holidays.
I highly recommend taking as much time off as possible from work during the holiday season. It brings an opportunity to rest and recharge.
During the break, I do make sure to carve out 1-2 hours for a planning session for the next year. While it's easy to dismiss the January 1 date as arbitrary, the change of year marks a significant shift in mindset. It can be a catalyst for increasing motivation, resetting poor habits, and making positive changes in life.
Unfortunately, most people give up on resolutions. Dr. Michelle Rozen is a psychologist and expert on human behavior, motivation, and change. She has researched the individuals who follow through and achieve their goals to try to understand what makes them tick. In her book, The 6% Club, Dr. Rozen found that 94% of people give up on goals they set for themselves within the first month.
I intuitively knew that this number would be high. Nevertheless, 94% is staggering and larger than I would have guessed.
While we all will inevitably fall into both camps at points in our lives, I more frequently belong to the 6% who consistently stick with their goals. I have worked to cultivate grit as a core trait in my life. I am confident that this skill is a significant part of what it takes to become the type of person who can do hard things and accomplish lofty challenges.
But grit is only one piece of the puzzle. Without a clear plan, hard work can become a wasted effort. A structure that keeps you focused on your goals is important for overcoming the inevitable lapses in motivation.
This is easier said than done. Dreaming up an end goal is easy. Translating it into the steps required to achieve that vision is much more challenging.
People often struggle to connect their larger-picture goals to the individual tasks they must complete daily or weekly to achieve them. But through years of trial and error, I have developed a system that has worked for me to keep me going through the times when my grit is at lower levels. In this post, I will share it and show how you can use this framework in your own lives.
Where Plans Often Fail
To illustrate the problem, let's imagine a person setting a New Year's Resolution on January 1st. We'll call him Steve.
Steve is 30 years old and mostly works 9 to 5 hours in an office job. He has a gym membership but does not visit consistently, sometimes going several weeks between trips. He maintains a regular social life outside work and frequently eats out, often making unhealthy choices when he does.
This year, Steve has decided that he wants to get into the best shape of his life. He figures that he will need to lose about 30 pounds to achieve this goal. To do so, he plans to workout at his gym three days per week and make healthier food choices by bringing his lunches and avoiding overly processed foods.
At first glance, this seems like a generally good plan.
Steve has a great first week. He's motivated to succeed and stocks his apartment with fruits, vegetables, and lean meats on January 1. He packs his lunches for work daily and brings healthier snacks like almonds or yogurt to replace the handfuls of M&M's he used to grab from the office candy jar. He fights through the January crowds at his gym and completes all three planned workouts.
By the end of his first week, Steve has lost three pounds. Despite the muscle soreness that comes with a new fitness routine, he generally feels good about himself.
But things start to go off the rails in week two.
Some of Steve's motivation has worn off from the highs he felt during the first week. He steps on the scale in the morning and is discouraged as his pace of weight loss has slowed.
Steve has a busy week at work, which has caused him to work longer hours and miss one of his workouts. The extra time in the office leads him to order takeout and make unhealthier eating choices.
Steve attends a work happy hour and two parties with his friends. As a result, he mindlessly snacks on bar food and drinks more alcohol than usual.
By the end of the week, Steve steps on the scale and sees that he has gained back two of the pounds he lost. He is discouraged.
Despite continuously telling himself that he will get back on track, Steve faces more obstacles in the subsequent weeks and continues to stray from his original plan. Before he knows it, it's March, and Steve's life has reverted to the same state as in December. Steve has made no progress and feels terrible about himself.
We’ve all been in Steve’s shoes at some point in our lives. It doesn’t feel good. But if we are to break through these challenges, we need to answer the question, “What went wrong?”
While one could argue that Steve needs to buckle down and increase his willpower, this is not the only thing necessary to keep going. Most people — even those in the 6% — lose motivation towards things over time.
Former US Representative and Olympic track and field athlete Jim Ryun once said, “Motivation is what gets you started. Consistency is what keeps you going.” That consistency comes from having a structured plan that you can follow day after day.
Steve never developed an actionable plan. Although he had goals, his implementation was broad and unspecific. He had no ongoing checkpoints to measure his progress and refine his approach. He was destined to fail from the start.
Steve’s story is familiar. Many people struggle to translate a longer-term vision into the projects, subprojects, and tasks necessary to achieve it. This inability to make this connection can lead to stress and prevent people from realizing their potential.
However, with a little organization and some work to break down broad problems into smaller parts, this challenge can be overcome, giving you more control and confidence to take on difficult tasks and raising the bar of what you can accomplish.
Segmented Planning
Several months ago, I wrote about the book Grit by Angela Duckworth and shared this image.
Duckworth introduced this visualization to demonstrate how to structure one's goals within a broader hierarchy. The idea is that we should have a top-level goal that represents our purpose and provides direction and meaning. That top-level goal will consist of sub-goals (as well as sub-projects or sub-tasks, not listed) that support the levels above them.
I have always intuited and implemented this concept but only had a minimal structure behind it. After reading Grit and seeing this visualization, the system for making the idea actionable clicked in my brain.
While there are many names for this type of approach, I refer to it as segmented planning, and it's how I stay productive and move things forward in my life.
Since formalizing this methodology, I've been more focused and purposeful with the things I choose to spend my time on. As a result, I've noticed some incredible benefits:
I can directly link my daily tasks to my long-term goals, which has helped me sustain higher motivation over extended periods. It has also helped me identify and eliminate tasks that do not move me closer to my vision.
I hold myself accountable for what I say I am going to do. Since I can link daily actions to my long-term goals, shirking responsibility is tougher. I can no longer claim that procrastinating or blowing off a task doesn't make a difference because I have evidence that it does.
I have minimized distractions. This method consistently returns me to my higher goals during regular review sessions, keeping me laser-focused on the horizon and ensuring that I'm aligning my day-to-day activities with my goals.
I have documented my ideas and thought processes more consistently and effectively. By returning to my goals, reviewing progress, and adjusting plans, I better understand what works and what doesn't. I'm connecting thoughts and refining the approach, leading to better outcomes.
Now that I've shared the idea and how it has positively impacted my life, let's explore the specifics and discuss how you can implement something like this yourself.
Start With Your Ideal Lifestyle
I am a fan of Cal Newport, author of Deep Work. Newport is a professor at Georgetown, the host of the Deep Questions podcast, and an author who has written a lot about the intersections of technology, work, and the quest to find depth in a distracted world.
Newport introduced a process of planning that I like — he calls it lifestyle-centric planning. Newport summarizes this idea succinctly, saying, "Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backward from there."
This isn’t a new idea. Almost 2,000 years ago, Epictetus said, “First, tell yourself what kind of person you want to be, then do what you have to do.”
The idea between both quotes is the same. Start from the idea of the finish line and figure out how to get there.
Newport examines this mostly through a career lens, but this doesn’t have to be limited to your professional life. When working through this exercise, Newport recommends that you ask yourself some broader questions that can help you define your ideal lifestyle. These questions could include:
How much control do I have over my schedule?
What's the intensity level of my job?
What's the importance of what I do?
What's the prestige level?
What type of work?
Where do I live?
What's my social life like?
What's my work-life balance?
What's my family like?
How do other people think of me?
What am I known for?
Newport's approach resonates with me. Our vision should be broad. It should encompass our entire lives, not just what we do between 9 and 5. If we are ever to reach a destination, we need a decent idea of where we want to go. By starting with your ideal life, you are creating a career compass to help you get there.
I start my segmented planning process with a version of Newport's lifestyle-centric planning. I ask myself broad questions like the ones above. The answers help me determine what I want my future to look like and shape my longer-term vision.
After this initial exercise, I identify multi-year goals supporting my ideal lifestyle's vision, tagging each as short-term or long-term. Short-term goals represent what can be accomplished in the next 2-4 years. Long-term goals are those more likely to take 5-10+ years to achieve.
For example, I can describe my ideal life vision in two sentences: I have complete autonomy over my time. My days are spent enjoying time with family and friends, reading and writing, maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle, exploring the world, and contributing positively to my community and society.
My shorter-term goals for supporting that ideal life include writing and publishing a book and taking my family on an overseas trip. My longer-term goals include becoming financially independent and buying a vacation home on a lake.
The process of defining your vision is unique to each individual. There are no minimum or maximum number of items to include on your list — although I would argue that you risk spreading yourself too thin if you have too many. You'll be in good shape as long as your short- and long-term goals align to your ideal life.
Don't worry about getting your goals exactly right on your first attempt. You will continue to revisit them, and they will likely change over time.
Once you have an idea of the horizon, the next step is to break it down into its components and develop an actionable plan.
Identify Your Projects and Tasks
Before starting to break down the problem, you should first identify the levels of time granularity at which to plan and track progress. With that grouping, you can work from the highest time horizon (your ideal lifestyle) down to the lowest level of granularity, breaking down the bigger-picture goals into projects, sub-projects, and tasks.
There is no singular, perfect structure to choose from when determining your levels of time granularity. Cal Newport calls his system "Multi-Scale Planning" and plans at the Year-Quarter-Week-Day levels. A college student might be better off using Year-Semester-Week-Day. Ultimately, your chosen periods should align with your calendar and how you break up the core components of your life.
Here are the levels that I use: Year-Quarter-Month-Week-Day
Once you've defined your time level, you should start at the top and work your way down the ladder. I'll give you an example of how this works for me.
Before the start of the year, I set aside an hour to develop my plan for the upcoming 12 months. I start with a list of the core areas in my life using the PARA framework I outlined in my 2nd Brain post. These are the essential parts of my work and life that require ongoing attention, including my job, family, finances, health and fitness, and writing, among others. I think about how my ideal lifestyle relates to each area and determine what I want to accomplish that year to get closer to that vision. From there, I develop goals and capture potential projects that I want to take on to achieve them.
After completing this exercise, I look through the full list of projects and goals and ask myself the following questions:
Does this plan look realistic to accomplish in the next year?
How should I prioritize each of these projects amongst the others?
Are there any firm deadlines? Are any projects not critical to accomplish this year?
Am I over-extending myself? Or can I accomplish more within the year?
Are there any other projects or goals that don't fit into one of the areas that I need to account for?
Do these projects and goals get me closer to my ideal lifestyle?
Are there any parts of my perfect lifestyle that are being neglected by what I chose to work on during this period?
These answers will guide any adjustments to my plan. I may occasionally include additional projects, but I usually eliminate some. After completing this exercise, I finalize my plan and proceed to the next level.
Work Down the Time Ladder
Planning sessions at lower levels of granularity follow a similar outline. They should occur at the beginning of each period, and the projects and goals from the higher levels should be used to inform more details at the current level.
These sessions should be less in-depth than the year plan and take less time as you get more granular. My quarterly planning session takes 20-25 minutes; monthly and weekly ones take 10-15 minutes; and my daily planning routine takes 5-10 minutes at most.
If I were to continue the progression from above as an example, the next level below the year is the quarter. In my quarterly planning session, I'll start with my completed yearly plan and determine what I will try to accomplish in Q1 vs what will be pushed to Q2, Q3, or Q4.
Some projects are easy to plan using this format. When I built my 2024 plan, I created a project within my Travel area for a Disneyworld trip in November. We planned to book our airfare and hotel in January, so there were some initial high-level logistics to take care of in Q1, but most of the detailed planning could be deferred to Q3 and Q4.
Other projects are more challenging, as many will last longer than the current quarter (or other time periods). For those, I try to add as much specificity as possible about milestones or deliverables. Where possible, I identify what I can finish in the upcoming quarter versus what will have to be pushed to later in the year.
Finally, I include any additional projects that might not appear on the yearly plan but are necessary to complete in the quarter. For example, in Q1, I will complete and file my taxes. This project won't appear in my annual plan, but I must do it every March/April.
Before completing my quarterly plan, I ask questions similar to those I did during the yearly planning sessions as a stress test. My goal is to complete the session with a plan that will stretch me yet is realistic to accomplish.
As you work down the ladder, your levels of actionability will get more detailed. I identify the deliverables I plan to accomplish in a specific week at the weekly level. When I finally reach the daily level, my plan outlines the individual tasks I intend to perform during the day.
From experience, I've learned that the first few times through this process, you will either over- or underestimate your capacity. This is entirely normal. Don't get discouraged or think that you did anything wrong. Life gets in the way, and plans often change. My ability to gauge my capacity has improved over time, and my plans are more realistic than they were several years ago.
The general concept is to create your plan at the higher levels first and push it down to lower levels of granularity. This approach allows you to develop a clear path from your ideal lifestyle to their underlying goals, projects, and tasks.
Maintaining the System
A system like this will fall apart without ongoing maintenance. Think of your planning system as a car. We rely on our cars to get us from place to place, but we risk our vehicles breaking down if we don't regularly get oil changes or change the tires.
All of the productivity experts I've mentioned in this and other posts — David Allen, Tiago Forte, and Cal Newport — recommend review sessions as a form of maintenance. I strongly agree.
Review sessions are your chance to course-correct your plans along the way. During a review, your goal is to measure progress against expectations. These sessions are so valuable. In a good post-mortem, you can understand why you succeeded or failed at a project. You can incorporate new information and adjust your plan for upcoming periods.
I recommend building a review at the transition point for each time segment and combining this with your planning session for the upcoming period. For example, at the same time that you plan for the next week, you review the prior one. I track this with a recurring task on my calendar at the end of each week, month, quarter, and year (I have a brief daily shutdown/planning routine, but that's shorter and less planned.).
Each review should take 5-15 minutes, depending on how much you worked on. During this session, I look backward at the prior period to gauge my progress and use that to determine if I need to adjust to the upcoming period. I also review my active and upcoming projects and broader areas to ensure I'm making progress in each.
While the planning phase involves pushing plans downward to lower levels of granularity, the review phase involves pulling knowledge upward. For example, when I review my year, I look to the quarterly level to understand key lessons. These lessons will help me inform next year's plan and give me more wisdom in crafting future goals and projects.
Bringing it Together and Integrating Into Your Own Life
I've compiled my entire system into the graphic below.
This is my system, and it (mostly) works for me, although I'm still constantly tinkering with it to reduce friction where possible.
I have some simple advice for anyone else trying to build this system in your own life.
Just start. And keep going.
Don't worry about trying to copy me. Feel free to choose the components you like from mine and disregard the rest. My system works for me, but the one that works for you might be entirely different.
What's more important is that you make your process a consistent habit. You don't need long sessions. If you spend significant time putting a plan together, you're missing the point. Plans will never be perfect. The point is to develop a compass to help guide your direction, not to create a map to find the "perfect" way.
Your process will change over time. I started mine about five years ago, using an Excel spreadsheet to track my yearly and monthly goals. Here is what my poker section looked like in 2020.
This sheet would inform my weekly and daily plan, which manifested within my task management software.
I've since moved on to Notion, where I've built on top of Thomas Frank's excellent Ultimate Brain software to manage everything. But this could be done with something as simple as a pencil and a notebook. The point is that you're developing a plan based on a longer-term vision and breaking it up into actionable steps you can take along the way.
Conclusion
Let's close by returning to Steve. Would he have lost his 30 pounds if he had maintained a structured plan? Maybe. Maybe not. A well-structured plan is not the only thing necessary to accomplish your goals. But having one in place would have better positioned him to fight through lulls in motivation and made him more likely to stay on track.
I hope I've convinced you of the importance of developing a plan by now. Henry Kissinger once said, "If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere." Without a plan that aligns with your longer-term goals, you're more likely to drift through life.
I’m looking forward to my 2025 planning session. I’ll probably do it a few days after Christmas when my kids are busy playing with their gifts, and I have a few hours to myself. Perhaps I'll share my plans in a future post. If you have your own system or if it aligns with mine, leave a comment below and share. I'd be very interested to see how your systems compare to mine.
If you like what you read today and want these posts sent directly to your inbox, please subscribe to my mailing list below. You can read more about the topics I write about here.
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and that you can take time off from work and spend it with friends and family.
All the best,
Lukich