Sarah Hart-Unger plans for a living. She is a practicing pediatric endocrinologist, host of the Best Laid Plans podcast, co-host of Best of Both Worlds, and author of Best Laid Plans: A Simple Planning System for Living a Life That You Love. I asked her to walk me through her own planning system from the year all the way down to the day, and then what she does with a goal that has been sitting on her list for weeks.
Every timescale gets a planning process to match
“Every timescale should have a planning process that’s proportional to said timescale.”
Her year gets a couple of days for planning, somewhere relaxed, preferably with her partner. They look at what went well and what didn’t, what is already on the calendar for the coming year, and then set goals by category so no area of life gets missed. She lets those sit for a while before she commits to them. Each season gets a half day, and she divides her year into five seasons rather than four. A month gets an hour to an hour and a half. A week gets less than that. Each day gets a few minutes in the morning to work out how much of it is already spoken for and to pick tasks from her weekly list.
At each level, she looks one level up.
She calls this nested goals. The day we talked, she had just done her September planning. She said, “You’re always looking one above, meaning I’m not going to get out my annual list, but I’m definitely going to get out my Fall list.” Every season, she looks at her annual goals, every month at her seasonal goals, and so on. That is how her weekly and monthly goals feed up into her seasonal and annual ones.
I think this is the answer to the annual goals document that nobody has opened since January. She said the problem is usually not the goals. People set goals and make resolutions, but they never build the system that gets them to check back in and see what is working. I do this monthly in a 30-minute slot, with a shorter check-in at the half-month point. I call them my C-suite meetings, because my name starts with C and because it makes me smile.
What to do with the goal you keep not doing.
Sarah said that as long as there is enough on her list that she is excited about, she can get through the things she isn’t. But she did a whole podcast episode on goals we get stuck on, and she gave me the questions she asks herself when something is lingering. Is it too big and too ill-defined? Then, “I need to make that smaller and less scary.” Is the bar too high, or is the task too big? She asks whether she is trying to do it too perfectly and whether she can make it less pressureful. Is it emotionally fraught, and have I dealt with that? Her example was estate planning, which she found very difficult, partly because of the emotions attached to it. Once she thought through what made it hard, it got easier. Do I still want to do this at all, and does it have to be now? She had a decluttering goal and had made real progress, then looked at a very packed fall and moved it to a different season. Not canceled, just rescheduled. Am I missing a skill or some help? A lot of the time, she said, when people don’t have the complete skill set for something, they just don’t do it, when what they really need is advice or assistance.
And sometimes the answer is to let the goal go. As she put it, “you can gently let it go intentionally, rather than continuing to torture yourself with it.”
I see this a lot in high performers. We are gritty, we said we would do the thing, and we don’t feel we are allowed to drop it, even when it stopped mattering. Part of the mental game is putting the time to review on the calendar, and then treating resistance as data when you get there. Figure out why you are resisting before you decide whether to push through or let go.
This week, open whatever you wrote down in January. Pick one goal that is stuck and run it through Sarah’s questions. Then schedule the next time you will look, so it is not another nine months.
Christina
A self-guided online course that transforms how you think about and use your time.
