3 intentional steps to plan your year for a successful 2022

I’m curious about your planning process.

Do you write resolutions, make a long list of goals for the next 12 months or do you sit down and carefully plan your year?

If you’re like me who’s used to writing a long list of goals every year and you want a better and more effective way of planning your year, then you’ll learn something important in this post.

I’m going to show you an intentional way of planning your year. Who knows, maybe it will be the planning strategy that will serve you better (like what happened to me).

After reading this post you’ll walk away with 3 intentional steps on how to plan your year and set yourself for success in 2022.

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You’ll also get to see my actual 2022 plan. I’m doing this to make myself accountable and I hope you’ll be inspired to make one too in case you haven’t done so.

I do Monthly Reviews, and I will continue to do so because it helped me achieve a lot last year which I have shared in my 2021 End of year Reflection.

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About planning and setting goals

Around this time every year, the most common topics are new year’s resolutions, yearly planning, picking a theme or choosing one word for the year.

There are a lot of ways people plan and set goals. But no matter what approach you choose in planning your year, success is dependent on the commitment and actions you make to achieve your goals.

Many factors contribute to your success and careful planning and setting goals is one of them.

To make things happen, you must have a plan. I guess it would work too without a plan. but it would be hard. You need to be intentional about your plan so that you’re not only focused on the goal but also the journey while you are working on your goals.

I have been a planner for as long as I can remember but I only plan properly every 3 months. I do yearly planning with R (my husband) every last week of December but it has always been about making a list of what we wanted to do and achieve for the coming year.

It was only last year when we embraced proper planning annually as part of living an intentional life. Wish we learned this sooner.

Why do you need to plan your year?

Some people are put off by this activity because of the time and level of thinking involved.

Fair enough. I mean, imagine planning for the 12 months when sometimes, planning a week or a day feels like a stretch.

Yearly planning does take time and there are some degree of deeper thinking happening when you’re planning. I could understand if people don’t plan at all and that’s ok, I guess. My sisters are both successful in their chosen careers but they are not planners like me.

Planning a year used to intimidate me. It’s too far ahead to think about.

The reality is some people would rather make a long list of goals and that is it. Just like me before living intentionally..

Every year all I do was to write a list of goals without really thinking about those goals deeper.

But writing a list of goals is different from planning.

Planning is more involved but more effective and it’s worth it.

It’s important to remember, if you want to be successful and achieve your goals, you need to plan and set goals.

Planning will be your guide, your measure and your source of motivation.

How did this annual planning process help us in 2021?

R and I have been planning yearly every December since 2010. We have achieved a lot as I mentioned in How to be Intentional with Money.

I’m not big on new years resolution. No reason. I’m just not used to doing it.

But, I always write a list of yearly goals on one of the pages in my Bullet Journal and so does R. And we do this every year. Then I do a proper 90-day planning and go from there.

But as we embrace intentional living, we also discovered a better and more effective way of setting goals.

It’s more intentional, deliberate, meaningful and more impactful.

It’s not just about making a list of what we want to do and achieve in the coming year. It involves a little bit more of knowing what we value the most, what do we care about more and how we want to spend our lives as parents, as a family and as individuals.

It’s only last year that we changed our planning process and it made a huge difference in our lives.

The biggest and most meaningful achievement we had last year was R’s change of career.

He left his corporate job in June 2021 and stayed at home to help with home learning during pandemic lock-down.

He then got a job at the beginning of December 2021. A new job that’s aligned with our core values and something that he likes to do. He is now working for a not for profit organisation where he is happier, less stressed and feeling fulfilled at the end of his working day.

That career move was bold, risky and scary because he had to give up a huge percentage of his pay. But we did it. All because we tried to be intentional in the last 15 months. And we couldn’t be happier with that decision.

We are now both working part-time and sometimes we call ourselves (for fun) part-time retirees We’re in our early 40s. We still do hard work (especially me) on most days but it’s by choice. And it’s never hard work that’s draining. More like hard work driven my passion.

How do you plan your year effectively?

R changing his career just goes to show that when we practise being intentional, going for what our hearts say is not as hard as it seems.

Dedicating a couple of hours planning for the coming year can make a huge difference. You’ll have a sense of direction and more confidence in taking action.

Now, the big question is, HOW?

How can you plan your year effectively?

The answer is: be intentional about your planning process.

Don’t just set a list of goals like what I used to do. Nothing wrong with it but thinking about it now, I could have achieved more and much meaningful goals had I done a proper yearly planning.

3 Intentional Steps to plan your year effectively

The yearly planning and goal setting process look different for everyone and there’s no single and best way to do it in my opinion. People have different approaches and different circumstances.

All I suggest is try these 3 intentional steps of planning your year and see the difference it will make after 12 months.

All you need to do is get a piece of paper and pen and set aside time to reflect and deeper with what you truly want in your life.

Here are the 3 intentional steps.

1. Identify your Core Values
2. Choose a few areas of your life you want to focus on for the next 12 months
3. Create your yearly goals for each of the area you want to focus on

Step 1: Identify your Core Values

The first step is to identify your core values. You will use this as the foundation of your goal-setting process.

Before having a blog, I knew what my core values were but I never paid this much attention to them. I never included them (at least consciously) whenever I do a yearly plan with R. (which to me was not really a “yearly plan’ it was just a list of goals)

We talked about our aspirations and goals and everything but we never went deeper on core values because they are something we thought we were already aware of.

In previous years we answered the question: What do we want to do/achieve in the next 12 months

Now, we answer the question: What’s important to us right now?

Asking that question encourages digging deeper into what core values we hold. Then using this as a foundation in our goal-setting process.

Whether it’s yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily goal planning, the core value is always in the background as a guide. Core values set the theme, inspirations and the bigger “whys”.

Here are the few benefits of knowing your core values

• it gives you clarity about what’s truly important
• knowing our core values helps you identify your purpose
• reflecting on your core values encourages self-awareness

Step 2: Choose a few that you want to focus on in the next 12 months

After identifying your core values, the next step is to decide the life areas you would like to focus on in the next 12 months.

Choosing a few areas to focus on is something I learned from the two of my most favourite books: Essentialism and The One Thing.

There are many areas of life and even though they are all important it would be impossible to focus on them all at the same time.

So the key here is to pick a few areas you want to focus on.

A good list to refer to when deciding what you want to focus on is the 12 Areas of Life Balance from The Code of the Extraordinary Mind

1. Love and relationship
2. Friendships
3. Adventures
4. Environment
5. Health and Fitness
6. Intellectual Life
7. Skills
8. Spiritual Life
9. Career
10. Creative life
11. Family Life
12. Community Life

Or you can just do what I do. For over a year now, I have just been focused on three areas.

1. Well-being (physical, mental, spiritual health and relationships with family and friends)
2. Family and Home (Family, Home management, Money)
3. Business (Blog and Shops)

Step 3: Create your goals in each of your focus areas

Once you have identified the life areas you want to focus on in the coming year, you now need to create goals for each life area. This is the time where you need to be specific and clear about what you want to achieve.

It’s only natural that you may have a several goals you want to achieve in each area you want to focus on but I suggest to focus on one per area for now.

This will help you stay focused that you’ll actually follow through.

You just have to make the tough decision of picking THE MOST IMPACTFUL and meaningful goals for you right now.

My Focus areas have been the same in the last 15 months. They are:

1. Well-being (physical, mental, spiritual health and relationships with family and friends)
2. Family and Home (Family, Home management, Money)
3. Business (Blog and Shops)

So I creates goals based on those focus areas. I start with the most important goal and then once it’s achieved I replace it with another goal in that area.

For example, my goal last year was to fix my sleep habits. I did it and it took more than 6 months.

Once I was ok with my sleeping habit, I started the water challenge and now am on my 3rd month and I’m going ok with it. Once am ok with my water goal, I choose another goal and this time, My goal is to read 12 real books in a year.

1. Read real books
2. Simplify and organise home
3. Publish 52 blog posts in a year and List 100 Etsy products

Conclusion

I hope that by sharing those 3 intentional steps in planning your year, I’ve inspired you to think about yourself and what matters to YOU.

What’s important to you right now? Think about what you would like to do/experience and how you want to feel in the next 12 months.

Who are you going to be in by the end of 2022.

Go for what you truly want in your life. Whether you plan (or not), or maybe just intuitively take life one day at a time, I am hoping that you go for what matters to you.

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