How to Plan Your 2020 Without Getting Overwhelmed

Dec 23

Dec 23 How to Plan Your 2020 Without Getting Overwhelmed

As we jump into planning 2020 there are a number of things that we want to keep in mind. Foremost being that what we're creating here is just a guide - there is no way that we could sit down and plan out every day until the end of the year and have it really be meaningful. Every Friday I try and spend some time planning out my next week, and even in that single week period, it can be hard to accurately plan.

I know for a long time I felt like planning my year was a waste of my time because I knew that the winds would shift and anything I had written down wouldn't matter anymore. Except, what I didn't realize was that my plans could shift with those winds as well. It has taken some time but I've started realizing the value in creating plans that are just as flexible as I am. Just because I've written something down on my calendar doesn't mean I can't change it. My fear of planning stemmed from me worrying that I was boxing myself in - but in truth, by not planning I limiting myself even more. This isn't to say that you will accomplish everything you write down in planning - let me be very clear that unless you are underselling yourself, you're not going to get to everything. When we're planning we want to be challenging ourselves.

I read a lot of science fiction books and currently I'm on the sixth book of the Expanse series, and while these books are fiction, they often take points from the real world. One example I like is the Goldilocks Zone, which is the term scientists use for possibly inhabitable planets in a solar system. There is only a small sliver of a solar system that can easily support life - if your planet is too close to the sun it is going to be too hot, and if it is too far away it will be too cold. To support life it has to sit somewhere in the middle, it has to be just right.

When we're planning we're also trying to find our own Goldilocks Zone - we want to plan out our year so that we are challenging ourselves. The trick is that we don't want to challenge ourselves so much that we are overwhelmed by it, but if we don't challenge ourselves enough it also won't be motivating. We've got to find something just right for us. This is going to be especially important to consider while we are doing this planning together because the right amount of challenge for me is probably not going to be just the right amount for you.

The way I try and judge my Goldilocks Zone is by feeling out my anxiety. If what I've written out gives me zero anxiety it is probably too far in my wheelhouse to be a real challenge. When I feel anxiety it is kind of like a weird tension in the back of my neck and into my shoulders - and as my anxiety rises my need to fidget increases. I need to move. And so if I write something down, think about it and it makes me feel like I can't sit still, I know I've started hitting a threshold of where I could slip over into too much anxiety, where the challenge is going to completely debilitate me. If I feel like I need to walk around the block, that's great - if I feel like I need to run a marathon, that's too much.

This is important for me to keep in mind while I'm planning because it is all too easy for me to fall outside of the Goldilocks zone. I'll set goals I know I could hit, but because I'm not pushing myself I get bored and never start them. Or I get swept up in the motivation I have while I'm planning and just assume that I'm going to be highly motivated for the next six months straight. Spoiler alert, that motivation is going to go away. And those plans become just as worthless as the too easy ones because I don't end up doing them either.

Unfortunately, no one else can tell you what the best level of challenge is going to be. You know yourself best, so think back to those times when you were challenging yourself and it felt great. Where did that feeling come from? Spend some time and try and figure out how you might be able to recreate those feelings. Undoubtedly sometimes we are going to get it wrong. Just because a task or goal seems easy doesn't always mean it will be. And just because a task seems impossible doesn't mean it will be.

Our first big task while we're planning out our year is to start visualizing how we want to end the year. For a long time visualization felt like a bunch of new-age woo-woo nonsense to me, but I've started coming along. The real turning point for me came when I realized that I didn't know what I wanted with some of my goals. As I was trying to write the goals out as SMART goals I couldn't figure out how to verbalize what completing the goal would look lie and as I tried to picture what it was that I wanted out of the goals I realized I was doing a visualization exercise. I think that is one of the biggest benefits of doing visualization - if you can't visualize your goals, it usually means that you don't actually know what you want out of them. Without knowing what you want out of your goals it is hard to create a realistic plan on how you are going to get there.

For a more detailed look on how to create SMART Goals check out Episode 5: Goals, Strategies and Tactics.

All right, we're going to start our planning process by thinking through each of the five life domains that we looked at in the last episode.

Our five domains are:

Home/Family
Work/Career
Health
Personal Growth/ADHD Management
Fun

Let's take out the sheets that you went over last week and read over what you wrote down for each of those domains. How do you feel like you did in each domain? Give each domain a score of 1-10 and then try and give each domain a score you'd like to hit for 2020 - and just as a note, if you make your goal to have every domain be a 10, you are way outside your Goldilocks zone. If you're at a 3 in family, jumping to a 7 is going to be hard. You want to challenge yourself while also setting yourself up for success.

Additionally, we are going to choose a domain that is our primary focus for the year. Try and choose the domain that if you knocked it out of the park that it would have a cascading effect on the rest of your life. Would getting a new job let you have more time at home with your family? Would focusing on your ADHD management let you be more present and focused for everything else? We've all got areas in our life that if we focused on upgrading would make everything else easier.

Once you've selected your priority domain and scored where you want to be, start writing down what it would like when you get there. What does life look like at a six in health? What are the things you are doing to maintain that level? What are the thing you needed to do to get to that level? And we really want to be able to see ourselves at that level. If we can't imagine what life at a level 6 looks like, maybe we set our sights too high. If you are having trouble writing out what it would look like try drawing a picture instead - that can be a great way to unlock what's in your head.

Do this for all of your domains - give yourself some time to think through where you want to be and how you are going to get there. Remember we are planning our year, this means we aren't going to be doing all this stuff at once. Don't hold back here, right now we're just brainstorming - when we get into goal setting we'll refine what we started here.

As you think through your domains and where you want to focus your efforts next year, a useful exercise is to try and think of a theme for the year. Just a word or a sentence that you can use to sum up what you want to be your focus for the year. My theme for 2019 was "You are Enough" - I was going through a rough patch and that was an important message to remind myself of. In 2020 I'm going with the theme of "Self-Advocacy" - this is a year that I want to focus on making sure that my needs are being met. I can be a little shy about saying what I need and I want to start making sure that I'm not just letting myself be a side character in my own story. Self-Advocacy is going to mean standing up for myself and saying no more. But most importantly it is going to be a reminder to myself that I need to make my own needs made clear, even if sometimes that means creating a little bit of conflict.

When you're picking your theme try and think of the things that you are going to need to hear throughout this next year. You want something that is going to empower you and remind you of where you want to go every time you read it. Once you've got your theme picked out, put it someplace that you are going to see it every day. I also like to write my theme at the top of my monthly planning pages so I can keep it in mind while figuring out what I'm doing that month.

Before we jump into goal setting we need to make sure we understand the difference between process goals and outcome goals. I'm sure as you were writing down what you'd like each of your domains to look like you wrote down a number of outcome goals. When we are first identifying what we want we usually focus on the outcome - so we might say our goal is to lose 10 lbs. That's pretty straight forward, but if we were to write that out as a process goal, we would change our goal into what we think would lead to that same outcome. Instead of "lose 10 lbs", we might instead have our goal be something like going to the gym a few times a week or changing our eating habits.

While it is easier to start by writing our goals simply based on the outcomes, it is often a good idea to rewrite them as process goals because that gives us a clearer picture of what we are actually going to be doing. Some outcome goals are very clear cut, like lose 10 lbs, but what if instead I had to goal to spend more time with my family. That's a great idea in principle but when it comes time to review my goals, that going to be a lot harder to measure - what I can do is change that to a process goal by writing down the something like, "I'm going to leave work at work and be home every night for dinner."

This doesn't mean I don't think that outcome-based goals don't have a place in our planning process. They are a great jumping-off point and they are great at identifying what you want. If I really wanted to buy a hot tub, that's a hard goal to change into a process goal - sure, there are processes like saving money for the hot tub that are important, but that process is never going to lead to the actual purchase of said hot tub.

The real value of process goals is that it shifts your focus on what you can most control in your day to day life. If you are trying to save more money and have a goal of hitting some amount in your savings account you might get completely thrown off by an unexpected bill, but if instead, your goal is to put a certain amount away from each paycheck you're not going to be thrown off by those say unexpected things.

Keeping this in mind for our goal setting, we're going to start looking at the first few months of the year. What are the goals in our various life domains that we can start working on? We aren't focusing on the entire right now - just the beginning, so what do you want to start on? How are you going to set up the rest of your year for success?

We don't need to plan out every goal we have right now - and it wouldn't even make sense to, in the next three months life will change. That's okay, we can refine and update our goals as we go. Remember, this is just a guide - nothing is set in stone.

While we're doing this I'd like you to also start filling out a Not-To-Do list for the year. ADHD can make it so that we want to do all of the things - but we can't. We've got to pick and choose what's most important for us. The things we put on our not-to-do list are things that yeah, we do eventually want to do, but we're choosing not to do this year. By cutting down on what we want to do this year we can focus on what matters most. Your not-to-do list can also have things you've learned you need to stay away from, for example, I'm adding "signing up for online courses" to my not-to-do list. After looking at my track record during my year-end review in my last episode I realized that online courses were one place I didn't need to sink in any more time or money - at least for next year.

Next up we're going to start filling in our calendar for the year. The first things we want to make sure that are in our calendar are the things that aren't going to move around. Anything that you know is going to come up next year - we want these things on our calendar so we can't inadvertently schedule over them. For example, I know I'm adding the 2020 International ADHD Conference as an event on my calendar.

Once you've got anything that can't move around the next thing up is to plan out the time you are going to be taking off for the year. Yeah - we're going to do that at the beginning, because taking time off is important and if we try to plan for it after everything else we tend to let it get squeezed out. Figure out when you want to take that vacation time and after you add it to your calendar also add another event well before to plan out that vacation. Vacations don't just magically happen so make sure you are giving yourself enough lead time to buy tickets and book accommodations. The amount of time you are going to need to plan your trip is completely subjective, but a good idea here is to take the amount of lead time you think you need and then add a month - or two.

I haven't always been great about taking time off - nor is it something I'm particularly good at right now, but it is something I'm working on. I always had trouble thinking of taking time off as taking a step backwards, but you know what's a lot worse - being forced to take time off because you're burnt out.

The next thing we're going to be adding to our calendars now is our planning time. As with everything else, we aren't just going to find time and if you think planning is important, start making time for it now. What I like to do is set aside time every month to go over my yearly plan and plan out my next month. I like breaking it down into monthly planning because even if I ended up missing a month for some reason, it isn't going to be too long until my next scheduled planning session. Yeah, I'll probably miss a planning sessions or two this year, life hits hard sometimes, but just cause I miss one doesn't mean I can't come back and plan the next one.

Next, we're going to start giving ourselves a rough timeline of when we want to complete some of the goals we outlined above. What I want you to do is look through your goals and pick the 2-3 goal that if it was the only thing you managed to complete this year would still make the year a win. If these are the goals that are really going to make the difference in our lives, we want to make sure that they are front and center on our task list. Start writing out the ways that you can make sure that you are following through with your intentions here. If you need some help coming up with strategies I'm going to recommend going back and re-listening to Episode 9: Compassionate Ass-Kicking for the Win and Episode 11: How to Make Time for the Important Stuff.

Unless there is a specific reason that you need to put off working on them, you are going to want to try and get these goals done in the beginning of the year. ADHD and time blindness make us really good at procrastinating - a year is a long time and it may feel like we've got a lot of time to complete everything on our list but let me guarantee you that something is going to come up.

If you want to have good results, it's a pretty simple recipe, identify your most important thing and then do that thing first. And let's slow down here, don't mistake simple for easy - with ADHD it often isn't that we don't know what to do, it that we don't know how to make it happen. I'd like you to just consider for a bit the idea that your most important thing might actually be finding the ways to make those important things happen. Unless you're lifting weights you probably don't just need to try harder - spend the time to really figure out what you need to do to make your goals happen. Our biggest threat here is just assuming that the motivation we have right now is going to continue throughout the entire year. Make some plans for the bad times, for the times you don't want to do anything. If we're only planning for things when they are easy then we aren't going to be able to follow those plans when times get hard. From experience, I can tell you ADHD gives us a lot of hard times - but if we plan ahead, we can make those hard times a lot easier to bear.

This Episode’s Top Tips

Find your Goldilocks Zone of Challenge for Goal Setting
Examine your life domains and choose one to focus on this year
Re-write your goals from outcome based goals into process goals
Once you have set dates scheduled into your calendar, schedule out your vacation and planning time before anything else
Plan to do your 2-3 most important goals in the beginning of the year