When you have a long-term plan, it’s easier to make decisions based on whether or not what you do today will bring you closer to where you want to be tomorrow. Clarity is bliss.
Earlier this year, Oskar and I sat down and made a plan for the next 12 years. There’s no reason why it’s specifically 12. We started with a 3-year plan but felt we had to expand it to see how we wanted our lives to shape and mould over the years. An hour later, we set our goals and dreams until the year 2029.
Two months in and we couldn’t be happier that we created our plan as it has brought the much-needed clarity and calm into our everyday lives. And so, we would like to share the process with you and highlight how planning ahead can benefit you.
Long-term planning has three benefits + it’s completely free
First, a question. Do we talk enough about our future with our peers? When we were teens in school, I recall talking about where to go to study, what our passions were and where we would like to be in the next 5 or 10 years. Come adulthood and while there are events we plan for, like travel trips, weddings and buying property, we don’t think much more ahead than a few years at a time. Maybe it’s because being an adult is harder than we think and if we live a more or less satisfactory life meeting some of our expectations, we are content.
Or maybe it’s just me and everyone else is having these conversations? Either way, us making the 12-year plan cleared it up for me and these are the three main benefits I see in looking at what you’d like to achieve further in the future (there’s a template below too, so keep reading).
1. Gives you a clear view of what you’d like to achieve
If your long-term goal is to be fluent in Japanese within five years, you will make an effort to start small earlier, perhaps by installing an app that can help you start learning the language. Similarly, if it’s to build a house or go on a hike of your lifetime, there are topics you can start researching already this week.
It also helps to separate your actual, must-have goals from the nice-to-haves, helping you understand what’s really important to you as an individual. If you do this with your partner, it can help open a bridge of communication where you can talk about expectations and how you’d like to live your lives.
2. Keeps you focused on a daily basis
If you know where you are going, it’s much easier to make everyday decisions. If you want to get a mortgage and buy a house in two years, you will be less enticed to spend money on excess bills at restaurants or rent a more attractive and expensive apartment.
Getting distracted is too easy in a big city like London. You have more events you could ever go to, there’s a new movie premiere every Friday and you are constantly living in the future as shopping for major events like Christmas starts right after Halloween – only a few months early. Heck! Shopping malls are already preparing for summer and it’s not even mid-March yet.
I have found that it’s much harder to justify binge-watching an entire TV series or not working towards a better future on a weekend when I have long-term goals and a weekly plan.
3. Small things won’t annoy or disturb you that much
Why should it matter that you didn’t get what you desired today if you know that in a few years or even next month it won’t matter? One way to let the magical rainbows in is by being grateful for what you have every day. The other is to not let the little things bug you.
And if you have a long-term plan, small things seem even smaller. Having your reward or end-goal in mind helps with going through life’s seldom mundanity and makes you more accepting of the challenges because it will be “all worth it in the end”.
Template: How to make your 12-year plan
The way we did it was simple and only took a few hours including the discussion we had afterwards. You can do this with your significant other, friends on your own.
You won’t need much more than a pen and a piece of paper, or you can do what I did and create this list in a note-taking app like Evernote, OneNote or an inbuilt note-taking app on your computer or smartphone.
Step #1
List all of the years and have three bullet-points next to each except for the first three years where you add an additional two bullet-points.
2018 | 2019 | 2020 |
#1 | #1 | #1 |
#2 | #2 | #2 |
#3 | #3 | #3 |
#4 | #4 | #4 |
#5 | #5 | #5 |
2021 | 2022 | 2023 |
#1 | #1 | #1 |
#2 | #2 | #2 |
#3 | #3 | #3 |
2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
#1 | #1 | #1 |
#2 | #2 | #2 |
#3 | #3 | #3 |
2027 | 2028 | 2029 |
#1 | #1 | #1 |
#2 | #2 | #2 |
#3 | #3 | #3 |
From here, you can choose whether you want to start with year 1 and 2 and move further, OR work from a goal-setting perspective and work backwards. There’s no right and wrong here and it will largely depend on how much thought you have put into planning prior.
What’s key is to take this opportunity to really think about what you want to achieve for yourself and what roles you would like to play in the future. Some examples to think about are your career, buying your first property, travel plans and which countries you’d like to see, activities you’d like to do and by what time you’d like to fulfil a dream, like getting a puppy (this one is a big one for me).
Be realistic however as it’s highly unlike you will be able to pack everything in one year.
Once you start building out the list, you may notice that it gets easier with every passing second. If you are unsure as to which year to choose for fulfilling a said goal, leave it “on the bench” until more slots fill in and simply choose the year with fewer things on your plate.
Step #2
Share the results with your partner or friend (if you’re doing this as a joint activity). This was, perhaps, the best part about our goal-setting exercise as it turned out I and Oskar had a very similar notion of where we wanted our lives to go. This filled up my heart with the much-needed clarity and inspired me for all the endless possibilities the future holds. It also helped communicate our long-term plans to our families and get them excited about our goals.
Step #3
Keep yourself accountable. Creating a plan is all well and good, but you will need to do something about it and get excited too (more on the latter just below). We have been using a project management tool called Asana for our project (LifeViewers) and it’s perfect for creating a roadmap to your success. Asana is a paid tool usually, but if you have a work address (not a @gmail.com but a @domain you actually own), you can get a free account. A good alternative to Asana is Trello.
Be thrilled about planning long-term
Setting new goals and making decisions about your future can be an exciting venture. But it can also be a daunting one if you focus too much on how you will get there rather than sticking to a simple plan and putting in the work.
Even I should remind myself of this more often. I used to be anxious about setting new goals because of my fear of not achieving them and not living up to my own standard or expectations. It sounds like a catch-22 and it is.
According to Wikipedia, “catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules”. You may know it by this modern example: “How am I supposed to gain experience [to find a good job] if I’m constantly turned down for not having any?” Trivia note: I found out about this term from the song “Catch 22” by Pink. Who said music can’t teach you about philosophy?
Anyway, back to the topic of long-term planning. What you need to do is to take it seriously and build the life you’d like to live. What helped me was to approach any kind of planning and task in my personal life as I do at work.
Come up with an idea, make a plan, stick to it, make amends if necessary, review how it went and improve over time.
If you want to achieve what you set, you will need a plan and you will need to commit to it. Some days will be harder than others, but the momentary frustration will pass while you get closer to your mountain.
A bit of inspiration from Neil Gaiman
Speaking of mountains and becoming your best selves, Neil Gaiman’s Commencement Speech always inspires me when I’m down. He tells a story of how it was important for him to imagine a mountain and how the actions he makes impacts his route to the peak of his success. He wouldn’t take jobs that didn’t bring him closer to his ultimate goal and was less interested in money if he knew that it was a step closer to where he wanted to be.
Over to you
Hope this blog inspires you to do some long-term planning for yourself or with your partner. It definitely helped us get an understanding of where we wanted to go, separately and together as a couple. All that’s left for us is to embrace that clarity and chase our dreams, and we hope you do the same. You deserve to live a life that’s full of wonder.