Bottom line up front?

This article is a shameless promotion of my 365-day holistic planner available on Amazon.

But before you click “back,” hear me out.

Because, by the end of this article, I’m going to give you a digital version of that planner for free (scroll down and click the link if you can’t wait). But also because I’ve spent the last decade refining and tweaking and tailoring a 360 degree, science-backed productivity system focused on improving all seven important aspects of my life.

It’s been so powerful for me that I wrote a book about it, have written countless articles about it (this being yet another), and have spent the last few years meticulously drawing out every month, week, and day in my paper notebook with a ruler and pen.

Why it’s so powerful is the purpose of this article. And it comes down to these seven essential elements:

1. Don’t create a resolution; define a mantra

I think New Year’s resolutions, in general, suck. Like the As-Seen-On-TV Ronco Rotisserie, you set it and forget it.

Unfortunately, once forgotten, you don’t end up with a juicy chicken. You end up stricken with guilt, feeling a small sense of hopelessness for the rest of the year. You know, like when you promise yourself you’ll exercise two hours a day, seven days a week, and then skip it after the second week of January.

This is exactly why the first essential element of planning your year is not a New Year’s resolution; it’s a yearly mantra.

A yearly mantra is, very simply, a statement of growth for your year. A word or three about what will guide you through the next 365 days. Last year my mantra was “Connect.” This year my mantra is “If Not Me, Then Who?” (thanks to Dan Crenshaw’s influential book, Fortitude).

“Connect” was a powerful mantra because it reminded me to connect with everything I do. Connect with my family. Connect with my business. Connect with my readers and exercises and food. This year, I hope my mantra of “If Not Me, Then Who?” will remind me to get to work, to take care of my family, to do the best job possible. After all, if not me, then who else will?

Unlike a resolution, a mantra can’t be broken. It’s a guideline. A mental slogan. A focus word for your year. With this word as your guide, everything you do can be measured against it. Does eating a chocolate peanut-butter buckeye fit with your mantra of “Healthy”? Probably not. Does spending 30 minutes on a treadmill? Yep.

Now, instead of focusing on simply one aspect of your life by resolving to work out seven days a week, you can bring your mantra to all aspects of your life, moving and changing yourself for the better in the direction of your choosing.

Other past mantra’s of mine have included:

Focus, for when I was constantly distracting myself with iPhone games like Clash of Clans or spending too much time picking the perfect desktop background.
Simplify, for when I was overcomplicating my business and personal life by adding too many bullshit life-hacks that weren’t helping me.
Clarity, for when I was all over the place and wanted to hunker down and spend time on what mattered most.

Sure, sometimes I forget my mantra. But not often. Primarily because when I feel lost, I always look to my mantra to refocus my efforts on what’s important to me for the year. But also because, as we’ll discuss in the next section, I have a system for reminding myself of this mantra (and many other things that matter) built into my yearly plan…

2. Writing down what matters once isn’t enough

So many planners either:

a) don’t ask you to think about what matters at all, or
b) only ask you once.

Asking once is better than never, but not by much.

Think about how often you get distracted by work, games, social media, or news. Even that New Year’s resolution you used to make likely became ineffective after a few weeks.

My point is, you get busy. Things change. Life throws you curveballs, and you have to adjust. If you don’t continually refresh that which matters most to you, it’s too easy to forget and trudge through the rest of the year, responding to every new distraction that interrupts your attention.

So you have to continually remind yourself what matters, lest you wander.

At the very least, weekly is a good cadence. Once a week, remind yourself where you are going and what you are doing. If that’s too often, monthly can work, but I wouldn’t wait longer than that.

With a brief written reminder of your yearly goals every week, you set the tone for what’s to come. You recall where you are going and set your intentions to adjust course for the upcoming week, the week after, and the week after that. Doing the same thing on a weekly basis helps remind you where you need to find yourself at the end of the month, and what you need to do this week to get there.

Spend some time at the beginning of your year defining what matters, then spend a bit of time each week reminding yourself of where you are going. With a clear direction for your year, and a reminder every week, before you know it, day after day will pass filled with intentional, meaningful work that matters to the vision you’ve set for your year.

You do have a vision for your year, don’t you? It’s the next essential element of a yearly plan.

3. Look back from your future

Get into your Delorian and set the time for December 31st, one year in the future. In that future, one year from now, you will find yourself having lived the absolute best year of your life.

It’s incredible. You are so proud. You can’t believe what you’ve become, and so you set out to ask your future self how you did it:

What did the best year of your life look like?
Who did you spend time with? How often?
What did you accomplish? What are you proud of? So proud that you opened a nice bottle of wine?
In what ways did you grow? How did you accomplish that?
How did you spend your days, your weeks, your months?
How many vacations did you take and when? Where did you go? What did you do? What made them so relaxing and rejuvenating and enjoyable?

Get the idea?

You’re describing, in detail, how an awesome year would go. Not a fantasy year where you somehow came into billions of dollars, bought yourself a personal jet, and lived a complete fantasy. No, a realistic year in which you leveraged all your resources, all your relationships, and made it an amazing one for yourself.

Why do this at the beginning of the year? So you can design the year ahead.

Without this vision clearly in mind, it’s too easy to simply float through the year, letting the wind take you where it may. With a vision in mind (and reviewed regularly, like we just discussed), you can know better what needs to be done to achieve that vision and see more quickly when you are getting off course.

You can also easily transform your vision into goals, which you’d then break down into milestones. Let’s discuss that now.

4. Start big, focus small

I know you have big goals for the year. You may have even written those goals down. But the problem with goals isn’t usually setting them; it’s finding a way to achieve them. That starts with breaking them down.

At the beginning of each year, spend some time setting really big, achievable goals for yourself. Goals that will move the needle for you. Goals that will help you achieve your vision.

But you can’t stop your planning there. If you want to actually achieve your goals, you have to break them down so you can focus on one thing at a time.

In my book, Home Early, I write about my $3 million sales goal in 2018. With a number that big, it was nearly impossible to envision how I’d get there. I knew that I needed to hit that number (lest I be fired), but how the hell was I supposed to land $3 million in sales?

The answer is one sale at a time.

At the beginning of the year, I set $1.5 million to be my goal for the year. After some quick math, I knew I needed to sell $125,000 per month to acheive that target.

But I didn’t stop there. I also knew that I needed five meetings, on average, to make one sale. And to get those five meetings, I’d need to call thirteen people. Doing that math, I quickly found out that I’d need to call 33 people per month or eight people per 5-day workweek to achieve my target.

How do I bring in $1.5 million? Make sales.
How do I make sales? Pitch prospects.
How do I pitch prospects? Make calls.
How do I make calls? Just fucking do it.

Making calls, specifically eight per week, was therefore my broken down goal. And that was much more achievable than selling $1.5 million in products.

Set your big, hairy, audacious goals. But don’t stop there. Break them down into small, measurable, achievable chunks. From there, you can start tracking them daily, and you can start building those chunks into your schedule, which happens to be the next essential element of your yearly planner.

5. A plan without a schedule is just wishful thinking

Photo by Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “a goal without a plan is just a wish.” I’ll add to that and say, “A plan without a schedule is just wishful thinking.”

So many planners help you define your goals. Some even help you define your purpose and vision. But very few combine help you translate that plan into a schedule for your day. The problem with that is, if you don’t think about how you are going to spend your time, even your best plan will go to waste when distraction hits. As Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Many planners stop at planning. A good planner will make room for you to schedule your plan, so you have time to actually work it. It’s not complicated. But it does need to be done every day.

First, with your plan in mind, prioritize your day. What is it that needs to be done first? What next? What after that? Choose two or three things that will keep you on track for achieving your broken-down goals for the week, which will keep you on track for the month and year. Then, put those priorities on your schedule.

Find open chunks of time throughout your day and set a date with yourself to work that priority to ground. Literally, block off time with yourself to do your important work. Instead of doing what we all tend to do, which is get to our prioritize when we get to them, make time for them. And making time for them means literally ignoring everything else.

In order to execute your beautiful plan for the year, you need to work on it. And working on any plan takes time. If you don’t block out the time to work your plan, life will (and always does) get in the way.

With your priorities scheduled, you will no longer fall victim to interruptions. Random emails and events will not fit into your schedule and so won’t get in your way. You’ll actually be able to work on the priorities of the day, which means you’ll be working on things that matter. And working on things that matter will make for a most productive year.

6. It’s an all-in-one solution

Look, this is simple. If you have to carry a planner and a calendar and a scheduler and a notebook, you’re not going to carry any of it. There are too many physical and mental barriers to consistently using all of them. The burden is simply too high.

Questions like, “where did I put that to-do” or “where did I keep those notes about XYZ meeting” come up. And if you can’t answer that question immediately, you will revert back to chaos. If you don’t know where you left your to-do list, you’ll go back to trying to remember everything you need to do.

So the sixth essential element of a “planner” is to incorporate all of these aspects into one single system… one single notebook to rule them all.

At the beginning of the year, you draft your vision, set your goals, and plan your months.
At the beginning of each month, you break down your goals, set your habits, and plan your weeks.
At the beginning of each week, you break down your goals further and prioritize your days.
At the beginning of each day, you schedule your hours and get to work.
Then, throughout the workday, you take notes and capture miscellaneous tasks for the future.

It’s all there, in one system, in one planner that you have with you at all times, so the path to your vision is never out of reach.

And, it incorporates one final element to help you continually learn and grow throughout the year…

7. It leaves room for introspection

If you don’t learn, you don’t grow. And you can’t learn if you don’t take the time (or have the space) to incorporate it into your life.

Every hour of every day we are learning something. We learn which foods we like and which we don’t. We learn what negotiation tactics work and which don’t. We learn how to talk to others, how to be more efficient, and how to become better humans. But if we don’t take the time and space to incorporate what we learn into our being, we’re not actually learning so much as passing by.

Which is why the final essential element of a yearly planner is to leave room for introspection.

It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It just has to be consistent. Every day, we can ask ourselves what we learned.

What successes did you have, and how can you build on them?
What was your biggest win?
What can you improve upon tomorrow?

Like the continual self-improvement found in Kaizen (where you focus on getting just 1% better every day), asking yourself simple questions like this will help you incorporate what you learned into tomorrow. Your most important lessons won’t be forgotten. And, at the end of your year, you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve grown.

The 7 Essential Elements of a Yearly Planner

To make good on my promise, I want to share with you my yearly planning system, based on my Amazon bestselling book, Home Early.

I’ve painstakingly created this planner to have all seven essential elements:

A space to define your yearly mantra
Monthly and weekly spaces to remind yourself of your vision and goals
Questions to set your vision for the year
Spaces to define your goals and break them down monthly
Daily pages to prioritize your day and schedule your plan, so you get your most important work done

Of course, you don’t have to use my planner. Any planner will do… even a blank one (I love the Bullet Journal methodology in a dot-grid Moleskine notebook). But I got sick of repeatedly drawing out my monthly, weekly, and daily plans, so created this one to save time.

Regardless of what planner to choose, by making sure it has these seven essential elements, you will be far more likely to find your future self happy, fulfilled, and having had a massively successful year filled with meaningful work and relationships that matter.