Creating a Life Plan
The idea of creating a life plan might seem a little cheesy to those cynics amongst us. After all, even atheists can appreciate the old saying, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plan.” As new challenges crop up every day, it may seem irrelevant to have a plan that only serves to stress you out when you can’t meet your goals. The thing about a life plan, though, is that it’s good for way more than telling you what you should be aiming for on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis. The act of making a life plan in itself can be an invaluable exercise toward helping you decide what is important in the first place, as well as setting out a clear path of achievement.
First Things First
Think about it—writing a life plan forces you to think, “Okay, what do I really want to achieve this month, this year, and this decade?” Besides more obvious goals like getting a promotion at work, this exercise can force you to bring up other aims that you truly want to shoot for, but are too timid, scared, or overwhelmed to confront in you daily life. Always wanted to write a novel, but pushed it to the back burner because you didn’t know where to start? Making a life plan will make you realize that if you really want to do it, you’ll have to fit it in somewhere and make a real effort towards achieving it.
Besides personal or professional goals, a life plan is also about defining the priorities in your life, so that when you get to the end of it, you can feel that you’ve lived well and put your time and energy into the right places. This can make you refocus on things like cultivating relationships with family and friends, and help to divert your energy away from any unnecessary stressors that are keeping you from being truly happy.
Finally, of course, a life plan is about motivating and exciting you, as well as setting out a clear path of achievement. Visualizing the end goal of your efforts is at the root of the life plan, and this can reinvigorate you and make you excited to live a purposeful life.
Taking Action
So that all sounds fine and dandy, but how do you go about creating a life plan, when it comes down to it? If you just sit at your computer with an open word processing document, you’re likely to become overwhelmed and more muddled about your life goals, not less so. This is because even a short life plan is relatively long, at about five pages. It’s an outline of all your priorities and goals, after all, and how you intend to get there--it should be a little long.
There are many pre-made worksheets and guidelines out there to get you started. Most of these will begin with exercises designed to make you think about your current life state, and the things that are holding you back from where you want to be. Others being with open-ended questions that let you muse about who you are and what is important to you.
The next logical step for many is envisioning the end of their lives, or where they hope to be at 10-year intervals. Think about your relationships, personal development, professional development, finances, spirituality—every dimension of your life. Doing this can help you develop a list of priorities, areas where you want to focus the bulk of your time and energy.
After considering priorities, you want to pinpoint goals that are connected with those priorities. If a priority was “retirement security,” for example, one short-term goal could be saving $100 extra dollars a month. A 10-year goal could be having $20,000 in an IRA. Each priority should have a string of goals attached to it.
And finally, comes the hard part: developing a strategy for achieving those individual goals. For the above goal of saving $100 a month, for example, you could look over your budget and decide which restaurant meals and other indulgent purchases could be cut from your monthly spending. This will likely be the longest part of your plan, since each priority has several goals and sub-goals, each of which will need a delineated strategy.
To Review:
- Brainstorm and consider your current life state
- Envision your future life
- Outline your priorities
- Define goals for your priorities
- Make strategies for achieving those goals
Additional Life-Planning Resources:
- Michael Hyatt--Creating a Life Plan: This leadership expert simplifies life planning into three simple steps. While he puts an emphasis on religious goals, this could be a useful tool for people of any spiritual persuasion.
- Creating Your Self-Directed Life Plan: This is a life-planning workbook designed by psychiatrists at the University of Chicago. It is specifically for those overcoming mental illness, but there are many useful worksheets that could prove handy for anyone wanting to map out their lives.
- The Well-Balanced Life: Here you can find a set of questions from Inc. magazine, designed to help you outline your goals in a number of life areas.
- My Strategic Life Plan Template: A college student designed this spreadsheet that incorporates many of the steps above: prioritizing, setting goals, and developing an action plan.
- FinancePlan: This is only one aspect of a very helpful life-planning website. Here you can find specific help about developing your financial life plan.