Five Year Plan

Here’s a little exercise I use pretty regularly when journaling, especially when I need to kickstart my priorities for the day. I don’t remember where I picked it up, but it’s very useful, for me anyway.

Visualize (and write down) what you will be doing in:

Five years; four months; three weeks; two days; one hour.

Five years is your life goal. What kind of life do you want to have? Five years should be enough to achieve it, if you try. Four months is a near term goalpost… a major accomplishment that you can realistically do in that timeframe, that helps you achieve the five year goal. Three weeks is a chunk of work that is neither vague nor hard to understand, that is necessary for the four month goal. Two days? What’s something you can do in two days that helps make the three week goal? And finally… one hour. The one hour goal is what you should be doing right now to achieve the two day goal, to achieve the three week goal, to achieve the four month goal, to achieve the five year goal.

One hour is our perspective. We can understand — and do — an hour’s worth of real work. It’s not a fantasy, not a dream. It’s what we can do, right now, with the tools at hand.

Once you’ve finished the Five Year Plan exercise, close your journal and start working.