Last week I had my second annual planning retreat — it marked the first time I’d done my annual planning process when I’d already done it the year before. So I can now speak to the benefits of the process from actual experience, and I thought it would be worthwhile to do so.
Data
Last year I set 25 objectives. I intended to achieve them by working on 7 projects (things you can work on with a definite endpoint, like “Make a website”), and 9 policies (things you do all the time, like “Run 3 times/week”).
Of those, I achieved 9 objectives, or 36%; I completed 4.75 projects, or 67%, and I stuck to 4 policies, or 44%.
Interpretations and Inferences
The first thing we did after our review was to celebrate. Despite the low percentages – a clear failing grade in any educational institution, which is another way that life differs from middle school – we were both proud of what we had accomplished, and we both agreed that it had been one of our most productive years ever. Goal-setting is useful even when you don’t accomplish your goals, because it give you focus.
The low percentages indicate that we still need to “dial in” how much can be accomplished in a year. I actually suspect that my 2014 self would be able to accomplish everything I’d set out to do, but my 2009 self wasn’t that disciplined or organized yet. This caused something of a depression as we compared our “most productive year” to the things we’d hoped to do in a year, and how big that discrepancy was. And yet I don’t want to scale my goals down, because I think I can learn to do that much.
What we did instead was to set goals that are more process-oriented. My boyfriend proposed to me while we were up there – we both agreed that our top priority was to keep our relationship strong and to improve it further. We both want to have more peace in our lives and to become the best possible version of ourselves — that was the second priority. I want to help people learn how to monetize themselves; he has his own vocation. What all of these goals have in common is that they set a clear direction, without specifying how far in that direction we must travel. If I don’t make it as far as I thought I could, that’s OK. If I make it much farther than I thought I could, that’s OK, too. I don’t have to make arbitrary guesses about how far I can go
I could do that this year, because I’d had a year to shake out which goals were vocations, and which were just projects. Last year’s objective list was a jumble of
- vague goals,
- of projects that would be nice to complete someday,
- of projects that would clearly take multiple years (maybe a lifetime),
- and of projects that were vocation-worthy, but aren’t my vocation.
This year I have it pared down to several overarching lifetime-projects, and have selected less-than-one-year projects to support those objectives.
But I don’t think I could have done that last year, because I didn’t have the data I needed. My first year of annual planning was kind of a data dump, that gave me a chance to list every daydream and career-like notion and impractical fancy that I’d ever had. I wrote it all down, and tried it all out. And over the course of the year, I was able to learn what really mattered to me. It was obvious in the list of projects that I’d worked on (because they’d excited me enough to receive sustained energy) and the ones that had died out from lack of interest. When compared to other, new items on the list this year, it became obvious that several of last year’s objectives were really sub-projects of another lifetime-project – a connection I couldn’t see until I’d spent a year experimenting. I think this kind of focused, pared-down planning can only be done in the second year of this process.
Recommendations for Future Work
The original Annual Planning post was written during my first year of planning, and was written for people who have never set out to do this kind of thing before. And I think that’s a fair assumption in most cases – I’d never done that kind of thing before, and people look at me funny when I explain it. But obviously some things need to change for the second time around: we added in a review of the previous year, and modified the goal-setting process to accommodate 2nd-year planners. I’ll discuss those changes in the next few posts.