The End of Year: Time to Plan
Now is the time to make the time,
Hope is still in sight.
Let us not go gently,
To the endless winter night.
– Rush, Red Tide
I don’t know about you, but I love to plan. Plan the day, the month, and most importantly, the year. Most people are running around shopping like crazy, but I think now is the most important time to stop, think, and plan.
The end of the year is a great time to evaluate this year, and think about what we want to happen for next year. I like to ask myself the following questions:
Am I better off now than at the beginning of this year in the following categories:
- financially
- emotionally
- with respect to my relationships
- with my body and health
- in my career or business
If I have one most important goal in life, what would it be? How much progress did I make toward it this year?
Here are some more questions that are great to ask:
- In order to make progress in my top goal next year, what needs to happen?
- What can I do to make it happen?
- What can I stop doing?
- What new habits can I create?
- What old habits do I want to get rid of?
- If one absolutely wonderful thing happens for me next year, what will it be?
Many people have been going to work diligently but have neglected their goals and dreams. Yes, they have paid the rent, but they are like the mouse on the spinning wheel. Working hard and going nowhere. It is easy to get into a daily grind of waking up with an alarm buzzer, then enduring traffic, followed by hours of cubicle hell and ending with TV hypnosis to numb the pain.
Since it’s so easy to get caught up in the urgencies of the day, it’s easy to let the day slip by without even noticing. That’s the value of taking time to think about our results for a whole year: it’s the accumulated result of 365 days. If we haven’t made progress in a year, we aren’t going anywhere. It’s so easy to be fooled by the daily routine and incessant urgent busywork and think we are actually accomplishing something. But unless we have good answers to the above questions, we haven’t accomplished anything.
Since the end of last year, the world has changed in big ways. America has apparently averted (at least for the moment) a financial crisis. Twitter and Facebook took over the Internet. These are major shifts in our lives. Why can’t our personal lives have such transformations over the course of a year?
Related posts:
- Ways to Create Value with Our Time
- Your Goals for 2009: Step One
- Automated Trading and Life
- How was 2008 for You?
- Top Investing Mistake #13: Not Managing your Time
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is one of my favorite financial books of all time. It's an allegory about a guy who has a terrible job, and how he overcomes challenges to achieve his dreams.
