2010 will begin in just two weeks, and this is the perfect time for us to set new goals, except that I’ve never done it before. in fact I’ve always planned when I needed to do so, without waiting for the new year to come. Still, this time is different because I feel the need to realign my goals and values.

The reason I feel a need to realign my goals is because I just had a few days of laziness where I would get bored doing anything from reading to working.

This is not good and I know it was a sign, so after a while I decided to deal with it and save my sanity.

Planning for the long term

I think that it’s difficult to come up with a general way to plan for long term goals, as everyone is different. However we can still use a general framework to help us planning for the new year.

The following is what I’ve used so far. It’s based on simplicity and practicality as I don’t want to start the new year with too much things to do.


  1. Acknowledge your current situation. It’s extremely useful to do a quick review of your current situation. Some areas you may want to look at are finance, health and relationships. Don’t be afraid of doing this analysis, as there’s always a way to fix all the problems, but you have to clarify them first.

  2. Deal with necessities first. It doesn’t help to work only in your finances if you already have a good income but your relationships sucks.

  3. Make a plan. At this point I usually have a list of 3 or 4 areas where I want to see improvements, so I write down a goal for each of them. It sounds easy that it’s not, as you have to write something specific and achievable, and write a small plan for it. I’ll show you an example of this later in the article.

  4. The map is not the territory. The fact that you have a plan doesn’t mean that everything will work the way you expected, so be prepared to change it accordingly.

Not just goals

When I think of the new year, I also think at how I would like to be. This is slightly different than setting goals, because I am thinking at personality traits rather than physical things. For these I just make a list of how I would like to be.

A practical example

Theory is good, but let’s see a practical example of planning.

In the following example you can see that I only have two goals for 2010 and three personality traits where I want to excel. As you can see I didn’t go for quantity but rather for quality.