I love yearly goal planning with my wife. It’s been an awesome practice that we started years ago thanks to The Best Year Ever program and the promptings of David DeWolf. It’s truly changed our lives: it’s amazing to see how many big, important goals you can hit each year if you have focus and clarity at the outset of the year.

I try to do a retrospective in most areas of my life, but I especially enjoy doing one in regards to my yearly goals. I’ve found identifying and implementing small, incremental improvements to important aspects of life to be incredibly useful.

What worked:

• Our weekly review reminded me of key goals and maintained momentum towards hitting them, even when I lost motivation or felt overwhelmed with other demands on my time.
• This last year was a busy one for us, and we paired down our goals from the outset to account for this. Being realistic about what can be accomplished based on your season of life is important. Although our goals were “boring” this past year, they were the right ones for our season of life. It’s ok to have boring goals that are important—but not every year! Over the long-term, they need to be exciting.
• Two of my goals were habits that I wanted to develop. I think if there were more than two habits, this wouldn’t be as effective, but having two habits to focus on each week was very powerful.

What didn’t:

We only did our quarterly review once. We use the quarterly review time to edit our goals (and sometimes remove!), change our strategy, or adjust goal metrics if what we originally set out to do was unrealistic. Additionally, not having this time set aside eliminated the possibility for us to have dedicated time to work on key goals that were slipping.

I also find that keeping goals around that need to removed or edited is demotivating. I skip over them and immediately discount them, which affects how I perceive the rest of the goals on my list.

Here’s what needs to change:

• We need to add more fun to the quarterly review process. For the yearly review, we try to take a trip and get out of our normal life for a couple of days, but for the quarterly reviews we’ve never done this. Combining the process with a fun experience will help us look forward to the process more and make sure it happens. A Groupon hotel deal is a great (and cheap!) way to make this happen.
• There’s a distinction between key habits and goals. For us, we’ve always treated habits that we want to develop as goals. However, there are important habits that we’ve developed (or are still working on!) that we want to make sure we maintain. I’m going to try to develop a list of habits and creatively think of a way to track our commitment to critical habits over time. Not sure how to do this yet without creating more work/time for us.