Happy 2024 friends!

7 years back if you asked me, what are your resolutions, and do you plan your day? My answer would have been that I have tons of resolutions and I don’t plan my days 😊. Today, the answers to the same questions are – I don’t have any resolutions, but I do plan my days in three different calendars – Family, Personal, and Professional. Well, this arrangement is for the current year! My arrangements to get work done are an ever-evolving story, but this is something I am trying currently, and I will know how it helped this year. In retrospect, I am happy with both of my answers for the given phases of my life. I am packing some lessons and some victories to enjoy this journey. With that I say, 2024, here I come!  

I am figuring out how planning works for me as I progress through my life. It changes per my responsibilities, vision, and goals. I see this as more of a navigation tool. I like to keep moving and learning.  And planning my days helps me today to do just that. I have been trying quite a few different planning methods over the past few years. None of the methods, I have tried so far has completely worked for me. But I still inherit parts of what works and combine it with the new method and see if that works for a given year. So, for this year’s planning, I am still making my Yearly Goals, breaking them into Monthly, Weekly, and Daily goals. However, I changed the visualization method so that everything is in one place. Previously, I had three books, for all of that, and it was getting cumbersome writing and carrying the journals.

I came across this ‘Trident Method’ mentioned in Ali Abdaal’s YouTube channel. He made this Excel sheet available on his website, a very helpful resource for making yearly Goals. That was my starting point, I modified it to reflect my needs. You can find my modified version here. Please let me know in your comments if you like it.

To fine-tune the planning, I also have the daily planning reflected in my Google calendar (see a snapshot below).   

A complete calendar will look something like this. You can move things around based on what you have achieved for that week or month. It’s a rolling calendar.

What I am struggling with now is that to pull me back from this task master mode, seeing all these tasks on my calendar forces me to finish it, but if for some reason I am not able to get to it, then I am very hard on myself. I am still learning to see this as a planning tool that works for me. Right now, it’s a good tool to keep me on track, but most of the days, I see myself working for it rather than the other way around. It’s a learning journey. But this is where I am so far.

I would like to leave you with this thought, as you begin this year. Plan your present based on the learning from the past, so that both past and future become a present for you 😊