As 2015 approaches you might be thinking of all the great plans you have for the New Year. The last few days of the year are usually devoted to think back all the meaningful, happy, sad, challenging or nurturing experiences in your life this year.
How many plans can you pack in a year? It would be awesome if we had all the time and energy to work towards all our goals, wouldn’t it? But the fact is our time has a hard boundary – only 24 hours per day for all of us. Time is one resources that is not replenishable. If you waste a few hours today, you will never get those minutes back ever.
It is therefore very important to select which goals you will be concentrating on in 2015. Here is an easy process you can use for your 2015 planning!
Don’t just think about your goals – put them in writing. Do a major brain dump. Take a notebook and write down everything you would like to work towards next year. You might need to come back to this more than once to capture all your dreams so take a few days/hours to work on this first step.
When you feel ready with noting your plans for the next 365 days, let it sit for a day and come back to work with those goals the next day. Why is this important? In the brain dump phase you are using your creative mind, you might even get into flow while jotting down all those aspirational plans you have in mind. It is good to give your creativity a bit more time to finish processing those thoughts and it might just reward you with an ultimate creative idea…something that mixes many of your ideas with a nice unexpected twist!
In the following phase you will be working with your task-oriented brain. From all the wonderful list you created, please select 3-5 goals that are the most important and/or urgent for you. Yes, you need to make a selection as you will never have enough time and energy to make all those dream come true in 365 days. So it is essential to pick those which are the most meaningful for you. Why 3-5? Because realistically that is the amount of goals anyone can tackle without major overwhelm.
Many great yearly plans will never come true because we take so many different things to work on. How can you focus on 10 different areas of life consistently every day so you see the results? It is impossible. So please don’t make your life more difficult and just take 3 to max. 5 goals that will bring the most results and joy in your life!
The next step is chunking these goals down to manageable pieces you can do every day or week. Put these on the calendar immediately before you forget about them.
You need to move your goals from paper to reality and that means you need a system that will remind you of these small steps every day. We use the Google online calendar for this because of its great functionality. Feel free to use your favorite calendar app or even a paper calendar for your step-by-step planning!
If you always wanted to begin a consistent yoga practice, you could select weekly yoga classes at Clayton Yoga Studio and add them to your calendar now so you never forget about them! We are looking forward to welcome you to the studio!