December 27, 2024
How You Should Spend the First Week of 2025
For nearly a decade, it’s been my ritual to take off the first week of the year for annual planning.
After the craziness that is end of year invoicing, project launches/wrap-ups, and the holidays, this week is a lifeline. It’s a conscious choice to dedicate time to annual review, goal-setting and business development.1 This year it’s happening January 6-10.
I highly recommend this practice to everyone; whether you run a business or not. If you do, it’s even more important. If you have ADHD founder brain, it’s even MORE important. Trust me.
The Method
I use the system outlined by Brian Moran in his book The 12 Week Year. Quick overview: set an aspirational vision, then 3 year goals.2 Use that information to set specific goals for the next quarter, then develop a tactic-based plan for achieving them over the next 12 weeks.
The Medium
I work through this process in three primary places:
- Work notebook (8.5 x 11 dot grid, Circa system)
- Bullet Journal/BuJo (A5 Medium, Leuchtterm 1917)
- ClickUp (project management software)
The Process
In December I’ve already announced the week I’m out, set up an auto-responder, and made a commitment to myself there will be no client projects, no work projects, no admin tasks during these dates.
Day 1 of my planning week I’ll do the following:
- Review each quarter’s goals for the entire previous year (work notebook).
- Journal about how things went, what made sense, what didn’t, what to keep, what to pitch (BuJo).
- Think about what I want to have accomplished by the end of 2025 (realistic, meaningful, etc).
Days 2-4: Break goals down into actionable steps. My focus is on the first quarter, but with the entire year in mind.
- Finalize the big 2025 goals (BuJo).
- Use them to inform my 3 primary targets for Q1 (work notebook).
- Plan the specific tactics to achieve Q1 targets (work notebook).
Day 5: Create Tasks in ClickUp
Once I’m clear on the above, I create goals and tasks (with due dates) in ClickUp. There’s a bit more refining that happens during this stage, and going forward this is where I manage/track everything on a daily basis.
+ Bullet Journal Setup
During this week I’ll also set up my new Bullet Journal for the next year. It’s the same process I wrote about in 2020: Bullet Journaling: What It Is and Why I Do It (think of it as draw-your-own-planner). I usually write my Q1 goals on a cover page in my BuJo, but practically I don’t really refer to this and never end up doing it again. Like the work notebook goals, I end up scanning through the previous year’s BuJo, which further clarifies the direction for the new year on a more personal level.
+ Family Goals Discussion
I’ll also work in a discussion with the fam about what was good/bad about the previous year, and what we want to do/not do for this one. We loosely follow this annual planner workbook from way back, but the key points I focus on are:
- Travel Plans
- House Projects
- Personal Projects
- Kid Extracurriculars
- Budget/Finance Discussions
The operative word on all these items is “when.” I add them to the Future Log section in my BuJo, which I refer to at the beginning of each month when I’m setting up the next month’s spreads (oh yeah, make sure to start X plants from seed this month). I will also put events on the digital calendar if we know specific dates.
The theme here, if you wonder how a tech nerd handles things, is that paper is for working things out, and digital tools are for managing it afterward.
A Real-World Example: How to Start a Newsletter
In September I created a list of all the tasks that would need to happen to launch this newsletter in Q4. If I were to follow the 12WY setup, it would look something like this:
Goal: Launch Experimental Pixels Newsletter
| Tactic | Due Date |
|---|---|
| Design logo and newsletter template | November 1 |
| Build newsletter system | November 8 |
| Design and automate welcome email | November 8 |
| Write and send announcement | November 15 |
| Write and schedule first newsletter | November 22 |
| Create process for writing newsletters | November 29 |
It was more extensive and messier, because I do things like branding and email software setup for a living so I just built stuff before it ever made it on a list, but you get the idea.3
The most important part of this process is setting aside the time to slow down and be intentional about your goals for 2025.
Equally important: the system itself. A goal is great, but a goal is only the what, not the how. The how is the system: identifying high-value tasks, assigning due dates, outside accountability. There’s also the matter of blocking out the time to actually work on those tasks, but that’s a discussion for another day…
Hopefully this helps give you an idea of what this process can look like and how accessible it is. You don’t need to overcomplicate it, just decide that it matters and start somewhere.
If you could only accomplish one big thing in 2025 to consider the year a success, what would it be?
Can you set aside a couple days in the next few weeks to get clear on that thing (and the system to achieve it)? More clarity is always good, even if it’s clarity on what you’re not going to do. If all you can manage is a few hours of thinking time with a notebook, your year will be better for it.
Footnotes:
1 Part of the benefit of this process is knowing it’s coming up, so throughout December my brain’s already been subconsciously working through things.
2 I’m very clear on the life purpose, big goals stuff, but if you’ve never done this kind of exercise before, you might need to spend more time asking yourself what you really want. The goal here is to create a system to make progress on the goals you know you should pursue, not think you’re supposed to. See my first newsletter on working on the right things.
3 ‘Design logo’ was definitely never on the list because that was an accident. I couldn’t help myself.
Love this set-up! Here’s to a great 2025!
I’m stoked to kick things off. 2025 will hit the ground running!