5 Step New Year Kick Off

I always look forward to the quiet days of interstitial space after Christmas and before New Year’s. A welcomed break between stuffing and Champagne. No obligations, no dinners, no schedule.

This downtime has become one of the most treasured parts of the holidays for me. It gives me a few days to drop any expectations of productivity I might burden myself with. I’m allowed to be completely useless. After a few hours of Netflix and snacks though, the vacuum of responsibility inevitably leads me towards introspection and daydreaming about the year to come and how I want to tackle it.

The arbitrary end of our space rock’s grand tour around the sun marks the end of one year and the start of another. Shaking our “Etch A Sketch” calendars and creating a blank slate for the 365 days to come.

I love the feeling of possibility that it brings.

This feeling of carefree optimism usually doesn’t last very long before it’s overshadowed by the dark cloud of disappointment and self-doubt that creeps in to remind me of everything I didn’t get done this year. All the forgotten plans abandoned dreams and failed ambition.

What helps to pull me out of this negative trap and back on track to being a productive human being is being intentional and methodical about how I will prioritize my ambitions and organize my time to get to where I want to be at the end of next year.

This is where this 5 step kick-off meeting with myself came out of the woodwork. Here is the framework I like using to launch the new year.

Step 1: Create Space to Think

Create some space to focus on what is important to you and hone in on what it is exactly that you want to achieve this year. No cell phone, no computer, no distractions. Get out of the house if you need to. Seriously, run away for a few hours.

It can be uncomfortable to be alone with our thoughts with no shiny objects to distract us from going deep, but it is essential to get to the bottom of what’s important.

I like going to a coffee shop with a notepad and leaving my phone in the car. Writing things down in this brainstorming stage is critical and feeling like I am being observed by other coffee shop dwellers forces me to stay on task.

Step 2: Ask Questions

Sitting down in front of a blank page is intimidating. You may not have anything come to mind about what you want to get out of the next year other than “better than last year”. This is where some prompt questions can help grease the gears and set things in motion. Here are 5 questions that can act as the WD-40 to the crusty mechanism of your self inquisition.

1. What am I most grateful for in 2021?
2. What activities leave me energized and how can I fit more of them into my routine?
3. What activities leave me feeling drained and how can I eliminate them from my routine?
4. What would I go “all in” on if I knew I couldn’t fail.
5. It’s December 31st, 2022. I’ve had a magical year and everything went my way. What did I accomplish?

Don’t limit yourself to these prompts. I like to approach this part of the process as a discussion with myself. What questions would you ask a friend if they were trying to figure out what is essential to them?

Step 3: Prioritize

There is a critical difference between a dream and a priority.

A dream is something to contemplate and imagine. It may or may not come true, but it sure is a nice escape from daily existence.

A priority is something that demands dedicated time and effort to achieve. Identifying something as a priority implies that there is a certain sense of stakes and urgency to getting the thing done.

Because priorities demand dedicated time and effort, which are finite resources, it’s crucial to narrow down the number of priorities we carry to a manageable amount. Too many “priorities” is like having no priorities. There won’t be enough time to really make a dent on 53 different priorities at once.

Now is the time to get specific. Examine your dreams and ambitions and narrow them down to three priorities. No more. Three.

Seriously. Only three priorities.

Step 4: Define Your Success

Success is an arbitrary thing. You and I can run the same marathon and have vastly different measures of success. Finishing the thing without injury may be my gold medal. While you, a pro, are hoping to PR and win the event outright.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of chasing other people’s definition of success. It’s a sure way to spend a large amount of time and energy for very little personal satisfaction. It seems obvious, yet I struggle with this constantly. Your personal success story might appear as a failure to the expectations of demanding parents. It may not be in line with how your boss would like you to spend your time. It might also not be what the “successful” people in your social media feed are doing.

At the end of the day, you are the person that will live with your expectations of success though. It is your story after all.

How do you define success for each of your 3 priorities of 2022? In other words, what represents a gold medal-winning effort for each of them?

Step 5: Track your commitments with KPIs.

A year is a long time to stay mobilized towards any goal. Without checkpoints along the way, objectives get muddy real quick. This is why key performance indicators (AKA. KPIs) are your friend.

In the business world, KPIs are a set of measurable criteria to gauge the long-term performance of a business.

In the context of personal accountability towards our self-defined success, they are the light posts that illuminate the path to the finish line through the murky darkness of our self-doubt and procrastination.

I like to define the KPIs of my 3 main priorities on a weekly, monthly and quarterly level.

For example, one of my top 3 priorities for this year is running fitness. Although I do not plan on doing any organized races this year because of the uncertainty brought on by aggressive COVID measures here in Canada, I do intend to hold myself to a certain fitness standard throughout the year. The measure of success that I’ve defined for this goal is to finish a 30k trail run in the fall while maintaining the capacity to do a two-hour long run each weekend.

Since I am currently quite out of shape, my quarterly KPIs are designed to ramp up to my end of year goal are as follows:

Q1: 3 hours minimum of total running per week with a 12k long run in the last week of Q1
Q2: 4 hours minimum of total running per week with a half marathon long run in the last week of Q2
Q3: 5 hours minimum of total running per week with 25k long trail run in the last week of Q3
Q4: 5 hours minimum of total running per week with 30k long trail run before the last week of Q4

In order to zoom in and measure my progress towards these quarterly KPIs, I’ve laid out my training calendar with a long-run target at the end of each month and weekly hours of running target. These are my monthly and weekly key performance indicators for my larger 2022 running objective.

Identifying weekly KPIs as the amount of time spent towards priorities has been a big help in removing pressure and complexity, which ultimately can lead to resistance, from the process. This has been especially helpful with creative projects. Spending 2 hours per day on writing is way less intimidating than having a specific word count to achieve with every given writing session.

Applying a similar approach with my other 2 priorities allows me to remove the guesswork from staying on track. I have clear, measurable checkpoints to achieve throughout the calendar year that will let me know objectively if I am on track or not.

Narrowing things down to a set of three priorities for the year is a challenging process. However, I’ve found that this framework not only helps me kick off the new year with intention and focus but also provides a built-in framework to measure progress on my goals in a way that generates positive momentum throughout the year. Checking off weekly and monthly KPIs is like putting money in the piggy bank for the hard times ahead. When I feel down about myself and I need a pick me up I can count on that piggy bank to get me through.

Having only three priorities doesn’t mean that I can’t spend any time working on or discovering other things. It means that if I find myself crunched for time, I know exactly what stays and what goes. Interesting things that are not priorities are leisurely pass-times, removed from any expectation of achievement.

Making steady incremental progress on a few essential things has an outstanding side effect: It removes the fear of missing out on the many things that are shiny and interesting. The quick dopamine hit brought on by shiny objects pales in comparison to the continued good feeling brought forward by making progress on meaningful priorities.