It’s the beginning of January, and usually at this point people’s resolutions are starting to unravel. For years I used to do yearly goals but over 2024 I moved to using a 13 week year, or quarterly planning model. It affords me more flexibility and seasonality in my planning, and it’s a good, low stakes way to start long term planning and goal setting if you’ve never done it before.

There are those that say that you should go on a retreat to plan your year or quarter, and I’m sure that’s nice if you can afford to do it but unfortunately I can’t. What I do instead is take some time in the weekend before the end of a quarter to plan the next quarter, and this is the process I go through, step-by-step.

How I Plan A Quarter

I start my planning on a piece of scrap paper, sitting with my calendar, and start mapping out what big block of “stuff” I have next quarter. In particular I take Travel into account at this point. If I have a trip planned, then it means that I will have less time for non-trip related stuff this quarter, and I need to realize that I have less than 13 weeks to work on the rest of my goals. So if I have a week long trip, I calculate that I have only 11 weeks to work on the rest of my stuff. Why 11 and not 12? Because there’s time that will go to trip related stuff before and after I return, and it takes time after a trip to get back into routine.

Once that’s done and I realize how much actual time I have to achieve any goals, I divide my plan into Large Categories.These are areas I want to work on throughout the next quarter, and they generally stay the same from quarter to quarter.

Working Within Categories

The different categories I work on are the backbone of my plan, the basis of the quarter which I flesh out with detail during my planning session. For me these currently are (not in order of importance): Health and Fitness, Reading, Conversations, Mental Health, Creative Projects, Productivity, Professional Development, Blog, Decluttering, Money.

I set individual goals for each category, all of them measurable, and this is the plan that I reference at least once a week, usually two or three times.

Wherever possible I set up the Streaks App and/or a tracker for the goals in my weekly plan. This makes sure that 60-70% of my goals are set on “auto pilot” and are included in every weekly and daily plan. I address the rest of my goals either when I plan my week, or not at all.

Wait, what?

I deliberately include goals that I know that I will have to stretch or significantly stretch to get to every quarter. Why? Because I view these goals not just as a plan, but as a call to action, a bit of a challenge. A good quarter is one where I got to 80% of my goals. I great quarter is one where I got to 90% of my goals, and if I ever get to 100% of my goals, then I’ve likely not been ambitious or creative enough when setting them.

Life tends to throw us curveballs, and so I leave wiggle room in my plan (there are goals that I mark ahead of time as less important, and entire categories that I’m willing to neglect if things get to that), and room to recreate the plan from scratch if the need arises. The plan works for me, it’s a tool that I use, it’s not something that I have to tie myself in knots over. I refuse to beat myself up for missing a goal, because if I missed a goal it just means that:

1. It was poorly planned.
2. Circumstances/context significantly changed (a war broke out, a pandemic broke out, a family member or I got non-trivially sick, I got injured, etc).
3. It was a “stretch goal”.

In this case I expect myself to rethink my goals and what I want to achieve, and replan them.

A bit about my current categories and how I planned out each one:

• Health and Fitness – the most “auto pilot” of my planning categories and absolutely non-negotiable. I’ve been working with largely the same goals in this category for months and sometimes years, so this is the quickest and easiest category for me to plan. It’s also one where I have the most trackers set up for: there’s a tracker for my running, swimming, gym workouts, NTC workouts and food logging. I use various health and fitness apps that track these, and the Streaks app to make sure that I work on this category daily. As a cancer patient in remission, I am not messing around with my health or my exercise routine. It’s also a must for my mental health, even though that’s tracked in a different category. If possible I try to have a road race to train for each quarter, though usually I only have 2-3 races a year, and last year I only had one. The food logging is something I do to make sure that I’m getting the fibre, protein, calcium and other nutrients I need, and keeping my saturated fat and sodium intakes relatively low.
• Reading – pretty self explanatory, this category has been with me for years. I try to read between 2-4 books a month, and this reflects this.
• Conversations – this category is all about having real conversations with people – not just liking their posts and messaging them. I set a goal of meeting certain people face to face for coffee, a meal or any sort of outing, and another for talking with friends that are abroad on zoom. Beyond this I have weekly recurring goals of calling people – usually between 1-3 friends a week. Yes, you need to schedule and track this. You’re busy, it’s easier and less risky to message people and so we stop calling them or meeting up with them, and we trick ourselves into thinking that these messages are the same as having a real conversation with these people. It’s not the same. It’s worth investing time and effort into this, I promise. Even if you have social anxiety, even if you’re very busy. I’m going for a minimum of six 1:1 get togethers with friends, and 3 zoom calls (though I’ll likely get 5-6 zoom calls in).
• Mental Health – most of this category is automatically tracked in the Streaks app and is part of my daily plan and daily routine. I suffer from cancer related PTSD so I don’t neglect this stuff. If I do the panic attacks return and I physically dread them, so this, like the Health and Fitness category, is a non-negotiable category. It always happens. What goes in here? Journaling, daily gratitude (goes in my journal), meditation, and other things that I may write about later in a separate post.
• Creative Projects – this is a fun category, and it’s here to remind myself to enjoy my life. It included sketching goals, Lego building goals, photography goals, etc. I try to get at least half the things in this category done.
• Productivity – this is here mostly as a reminder to plan every day, plan my week, and perform a shutdown routine on workdays so I don’t think about work when I’m not at work.
• Personal Development – these are professional personal goals, usually tied to learning new skills or obtaining a certain certification.
• Blog – I used to track this as part of my creative projects, but as I ended up neglecting this blog for a month or two last year, I separated this to its own category so that I can give it more focus. This is tied to a weekly tracker and just tracks the amount of posts I publish a week.
• Decluttering – lists things that I want to get out of my house over the next quarter. Simple enough.
• Money – this is a list of money related things that I want to take care of – pension and investment reviews and plans, saving up money for certain goals, reducing certain bills, etc. This is a useful category because if you’re anything like me then this is something that you dread and will put off unless you force yourself to be really on it.

Since I’ve been working with most of these categories for a long time and since many of them are repeatable, much of my planning is just reviewing and copying over last quarter’s plan. The rest of the plan is things that I put a bit of effort into researching before I commit to, sometimes drafting them a few times before settling on my final quarterly goals.

I hope this inspires you to create your own quarterly plan. Let me know if it does and if there’s anything else you want to know about my planning setup.