How to plan and prioritise your goals for the next quarter
I love goal setting and I love goals. Give me a 30-day challenge and I’m excited.
I’ve already written about creating a weekly rhythm and week goals, but when it comes to the end of the month or the end of the quarter, it’s a slightly different approach. Either way, it’s a time I really enjoy. The clarity and calm that comes with a well thought through plan.
And then I realise… I WANT TO DO IT ALL.
If you’ve noticed the pattern of setting a load of goals and then losing momentum with them, or even worse forgetting about them altogether, it’s important to recgonise this as a pattern and experiment with your planning thought process.
Here I share a simple but powerful process for effective 90-day or monthly planning and prioritising...
1) Get it all down on paper (aka the ‘goals avalanche’)
I’ve learned the hard way that trying to process in my head all the ideas along with the things I could do, and all the different categories of goals is a surefire recipe for overwhelm. One minute my mind will jump to yoga, and then to professional intentions and then to my creative hopes.
In 2016 I took Todd Herman’s 90 Day Year programme and quite frankly, it was life-changing for me in the way I think about goals. My favourite term was the ‘goals avalanche’. Basically you let all the things in your head or that you’d like to achieve in a particular period of time get written down in some form.
For example, say with your health, you think you could do with cutting down to one coffee a day. You’d also like to increase your meditation practice. You would like to start weight training 3x a week. For your mental health, journaling is a good habit to develop. Oh, it would be great to cook two new recipes a week too. The aim is to keep going like this until you run dry.
It’s great to have so many ideas for your growth and improvement, but for now, just write them all down. That avalanche can be as big as you want.
2) Go through all categories of your life
Usually, it’s a business or work activity that gets the lion’s share of quarterly planning, but we know these days that performance is linked to your holistic physical and emotional health. Relationships, fitness and personal finance feed into wellbeing, as does creativity and learning. So for me, it all needs to be laid out. Any activity I commit too requires time and effort - a limited resource that can’t be used elsewhere (this article shares the powerful Essentialism principles behind this).
I like to create a goals avalanche in all areas of life and let the categories form in a way that makes sense to me. Here are the categories I used recently, but I’d advise you to make your own:
Work and business (I include income goals here)
Health (I put fitness and food into one)
Personal finance
Learning and knowledge
Creation
Networking
Entrepreneurship and idea experimentation
My support team & investments
Organisation/cleansing
Once you have the categories, you can create a goal avalanche for each one and your line of thinking will probably expand, so let new categories form if they want to, with the titles that speak to you.
3) Come back to the ONE THING
Now you’ve got yourself completely overwhelmed with 50 odd goals or intentions, I find it helpful to bring yourself back to simplicity and ask if ONE thing was to happen next quarter, what would make the biggest positive impact on my life? Inspired by the book The ONE Thing of course.
In Jan 2017 I did this and do you know what it was....find a partner.
Now although that wasn’t fully in my control, it made me realise that if I set lots of other goals and intentions, it could take me away from creating space for the most impactful thing my heart was craving at that point in my life. It was just a really valuable question to ask myself in the context of my quarterly planning.
It helped me look at all of those goals in a new light. Anything that was me engaging in new hobbies and meeting people, was in support. Activities that were me behind my laptop or working extra hard to up my income or going to the same gym for more hours, could be a detractor.
A happy story… I actually met my now partner in that quarter and as a result, I always ask myself this simple question. What would be the one thing this quarter that would most positively impact my life?
4. Step away and let the unconscious work
Counter-intuitive but immensely powerful is doing all the steps above and then allowing your subconscious brain to work its magic. This is especially good if you’re feeling stuck or indecisive on deciding which goals to execute on and what strategies you’ll need to achieve them.
Actively relax and go slow. Working hard and engaging your brain with lots of other activities isn’t going to give your unconscious space it needs, so creating an intentional pause is what you’re aiming for. Take a walk, have a bath or sit and look out of the window.
When thoughts around your goals come up, note them down. I find once I get on a roll, it usually flows, and the clarity of which goals and how to go about, do eventually come to me. This is a huge advancement where I used to force planning sessions and have a goal to complete my goals. It almost made for the perfect resistance.
After the process
You might think you need a fancy goal app or planning document to record things, but really just having gone through this process and documented them in some form is enough. I find this process so messy that I just use a sheet of paper and scribble to accommodate my thinking. Once it’s out, then you could put it in a nice format, but don’t let it detract you too much from the decisions and the action.
The key is that you end up with the following:
One main outcome goal that would make your life better and that can act as a theme
Chosen projects or sub-goals with an idea of the strategy to achieve them
Lots of goals that you have decided to put on the backburner for this quarter (it’s really important that you consciously decide on these)
And so then you can start to take action on your plans. Of course, these plans and these goals might change as you go about working on them, and that is fine. Remember, you can’t be adaptable or agile in your plans if you don’t have an actual plan to start with :)