A "life plan" and plans for the coming years are somewhat abstract things that can still change and be refined many times. A plan for the year, however, is something more concrete that we will work with very soon.
Before we continue talking about plans for the year, let us recall from the book "How to Master Productivity and Planning?" what a backlog is and what types of backlogs exist. Let me remind you — and perhaps even add — that from the perspective of material classification, goals can be:
— financial,
— time-based.
From the perspective of life classification:
— life goals (global / primary),
— auxiliary (secondary),
— routine,
— family.
As for material classification, I think there is no need to explain much: if a goal requires money, it is a financial goal; if it requires time, it is a time-based goal. Let us look at life classification in a bit more detail.
Life goals, also called global goals, are goals you set for your life and toward which you need to strive (if necessary by breaking them into sub-goals).
Auxiliary, or secondary, goals also play an important role in people's lives, but they are not foundational. Buying a car is a good goal, but if you want to become a famous musician (since we are continuing the theme of the previous chapter), that goal is unlikely to advance you much in your musical pursuits.
Among auxiliary goals you can also single out routine ones — those that need to be done regularly and that do not help achieve primary goals. Although primarily it is tasks (the steps toward a goal) that are routine, not goals themselves, sometimes you may need to place entire goals in the routine group. This may be necessary, for example, if routine matters take up a lot of your time, you cannot get rid of them, and you need to account for them in planning to estimate time more or less correctly. Separating routine goals from auxiliary ones is a personal matter.
You can go further and also single out family goals — those that need to be done with or for the family. These can be financial goals for gifts or time-based goals for attention. Whether to single out such goals is up to each person. You may also have other backlogs if you decide to create one, for example a backlog called "Education" or something else.
So at this stage it is time to unpack these lists, which I will call backlogs. If you have a "life plan" with life goals recorded in it, the goals and tasks that will go into work in the coming year will largely be taken from this backlog. It is not critical if you do not have a "life plan" — then your near-term goals will be formed from the needs and wants whose fulfillment you consider necessary in the coming year, that is, from the auxiliary backlog.
If you have global goals and take them into work for the current year, that does not at all mean that you cannot and do not need to take something else into work. On the contrary, many items from the auxiliary list should be included for the coming year. Everything you want to take into work in the coming year — whether only global goals or auxiliary ones as well — you should temporarily copy to another place that will later serve as the list for forming goals for the coming year. Ideally this list should have from 10 to 30 goals. However, each person may have their own number — it all depends entirely on your financial and time capabilities.
If we talk about the percentage ratio of this list, ideally there should be an equal number of life and secondary goals (say, 10 each). However, even an equal distribution of goals is often a rarity, and sometimes you have to settle for a ratio of 25% global goals to 75% auxiliary.
