At this point we have before us a list of goals for the coming year sorted by importance, along with marks indicating whether each goal is financial or time-based. A little lower is a list of routine tasks that, one way or another, nobody is likely to do for you, which means you will have to allocate your time to them, and possibly money as well.
With these two lists in hand, you now need to analyze them in detail. It is important to take from them exactly as much as you can accomplish this year. Everything else will be moved to later years, where it may turn out to be no longer relevant and not require completion at all. You will probably have to sacrifice items from the first list, since it is unlikely you can get rid of routine tasks. Moreover, the sacrifices will most likely affect items at the end of the first list, since you sorted it by importance earlier.
"Take exactly as much as I can accomplish this year" — that is a good question, each of you will say, and ask a perfectly reasonable follow-up: but how many exactly? This is indeed an important point for which there is no single correct answer. However, there are at least three nuances worth considering when forming the final list.
First, with each passing year, knowing your capabilities, you will determine more and more accurately how many tasks from your backlogs you can actually accomplish. So there is nothing terrible if in the first couple of years something you planned remains uncompleted. It only means that you do not yet have experience in precise planning, but at the same time you will acquire a valuable skill of planning in general, which is already a huge achievement.
Second, before starting to carry out tasks for the first month it is worth critically reassessing your goals for the year. Since breaking goals down by quarters will be roughly even, and then within quarters by months, you can understand even before the calendar year begins: have I taken on too much (or, conversely, too little) for the coming year? We will talk about how to plan quarters and months in the sections that follow.
The third nuance is that you should not spend all your free time (which is roughly 8 hours every day + 2 days off + vacation) pushing yourself to the limit and scheduling tasks for every bit of available free time. Here it is worth remembering that everything you do in your personal time free from work and sleep can be divided into the following groups:
— time spent achieving scheduled goals
— time on routine and household chores: cleaning, washing dishes, haircuts, shaving and much else (routine tasks)
— time spent with relatives and loved ones (family goals and tasks)
— other unplanned time expenditures (colds and illness, spontaneous circumstances such as natural disasters, death of loved ones and many other unpleasant nuances and events)
— rest and recovery (rather strange that I listed this last, yet it should be among the very first).
Analyzing all these directions of personal time expenditure, one can conclude: time spent achieving goals, in the most optimistic case, will not exceed 50% of your available time (not counting sleep and work). Most often it is 20–40%, but in the long term that is quite enough to achieve significant results. Although in my case, with proper discipline, I can allocate up to 80% of my personal time to my goals.
You may turn out to be a wealthy but very busy person, and then tasks requiring financial investment will be completed faster, while tasks requiring time will proceed extremely slowly. Or, conversely, you may have a lot of free time but little money. In that case financial goals will be achieved slowly, while time-based tasks will be completed quickly. However, the most logical thing in such a situation would be to spend your time resources, for example, on education that will provide you with financial stability in the future.
It is also important to remember that financially you cannot "jump higher than your head." If you planned that your financial goals will require $50,000 next year, but your total annual income is only $30,000, that is a clear signal to revise your plans and move some goals to the following year. Of course you can take out a loan or borrow money from friends, but how advisable that is — only you can decide.
Thus, I expect that at this stage you have analyzed your planned goals, and now we can confidently move forward and begin planning them.
