Ep. 118 Plan With Me For 2025: A Step-by-Step Framework For Actually Effective Goal Setting (+ Using AI!)

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1:37What is up and welcome to Working Hard Hardly Working. Today's episode will be a bit different from usual, but as we're near the end of the year, you know, my planning mode kicks into high gear. Red lights start flashing in my head and I get very anxious if I'm more than a meter away from a planner. And I really feel that facing 365 days all at once can feel very overwhelming. but I also truly believe that breaking it down makes it manageable and if you're me it also makes it pretty exciting. I'm not really one for the whole new year new me thing but I very much love the opportunity that a new year brings generally to reset, realign, plan and just look at like exciting moments ahead and set very achievable goals.

2:20I did a video last year all about how to plan for 2024 and it was one of our most popular episodes to date so I thought I would do an updated one including everything I've learned about planning this year and also how I use AI to help me. So this is very much an episode to grab a cup of tea and you know a nice drink maybe a little sweet treat and let's dive into creating our best year yet for 2025 and beyond. Before we get into the episode if you are enjoying these solo episodes please make sure to hit subscribe It is a huge, huge help and lets us bring even bigger and better episodes to you in 2025.

2:56And don't we all want that?

3:02So before we get into the episode, we are going to be doing a complete step-by-step in terms of how to plan for 2025. But I gave this pep talk last year and I'm going to give it to you again because your life is too important to let pass you by. and it is very, very easy to go through each year just watching the time pass. I was actually just listening to a podcast literally just now and they were basically saying that you can be one of those people that always lands on your feet. Like you genuinely can. You can be one of those people who gets by with the bare minimum and you land on your feet and you're just like, oh, maybe I'm just one of those lucky people.

3:38Everything works out for me. And that's great. That's fantastic. And I'm really pleased that you always land on your feet. but also if you are not genuinely putting effort in to build your life in the way you want to you are basically just letting life pass you by because if you are landing on your feet in those situations imagine how much you can land on your feet if you actually put a bit more effort in you actually start looking at okay this is where I want to get to in five years how do I reverse engineer that so that this next year makes genuine forward movements in the direction of where you want to get to because I promise you, you can get through the next year regardless.

4:14Like you will get through the next year, you will have a good time, you'll have some good times, you'll have some bad times but what you will not do is genuinely be able to decide the course of your future if you do not plan it, if you don't do not have like a good amount of time properly reflecting on your past year and establishing where you want to get to and being able to break that down into goals that you actually stick to and remember this is exciting like this is an exciting part it's always exciting going into the year goal setting and writing down all the things you want to achieve but do not fall into the trap of writing down all of your goals getting the dopamine hit from writing down all of your goals and then just completely ignoring them because there are a lot of things that are not doing the thing.

5:04Literally everything that is not doing the thing is not doing the thing. You have to actually take steps forward to be able to get to where you want to get to. The caveat to this is you do not have to be someone who has lofty goals. Your big goal can be to want to be able to work less, to have more freedom generally, and to not achieve big work things. It doesn't need to be that at all. But even doing that nowadays is really fucking hard. like you've got to put work in to get there so I would highly highly recommend spending some time thinking about all of this and really making sure that you are working to like you are steering in the right direction otherwise you are just driving and a lot of the time you are driving yourself into the ground without actually making progress so pep talk is done we're going to go straight into step one and step one is reflecting on the past year so as I said before moving forward there is literally no point beginning to plan if you haven't reflected on the last year.

6:01We grow and change a lot within a year. A lot of the things you won't even realise now that were goals last year that are no longer goals, even if you haven't reached them. So I always start by checking back in on my goals for last year and assessing whether I achieve them or not. And more importantly, whether I still think they are achievable and the right goals for me. This definitely isn't a task in shaming yourself for not achieving specific things. You have made it through the year and life often gets in the way or puts you on different paths or throws things at you that makes you look at those goals and think do you know what those are so insignificant in terms of the things I'm trying to get through at the moment and that is fine that's that's kind of just life but it is an act of self-respect to not just forget about your old goals and skip straight to the dopamine hit of setting new ones you need to parent yourself you don't get to set your fun new goals until you've reflected on your past ones because otherwise this is just a little exercise in writing some things down and seeing how quickly you can give yourself a dopamine hit about imagining your future without actually spending some time looking at what the evidence says about your past and how you can use that to be able to build a stronger next year.

7:06So the first thing I do is I open up my digital planner and I head to my yearly goals tab and I work out how well I've done against my goals. So they're all measurable. We'll be going through this this year in terms of how you set proper goals but it means I can work out exactly how close I got to achieving them. The key questions I ask myself at this stage are, what have I achieved this year? What ways have I enjoyed working this year? What habits have worked for me this year? What have I not achieved this year and why? I then write down any key roadblocks that have kept me from reaching my goals and I break them down into things that I can control and things I can't.

7:42This really helps me with contextualising the last year and knowing when I need to push myself versus giving myself some slack when life has been lifing. Step two, we're talking about knowing where you are going. Before diving into specific goals, I think it is essential to get clear on the big picture of what you want out of life. Last year, I did this through a vision board. A vision board represents everything you're working towards, from the actions and habits you want to develop to your overall lifestyle goals. Don't get me wrong, I will still be vision boarding the shit out of next year.

8:12I find it really, really fun and I actually set it as my phone background, not the one that's like the first screen you see, your lock screen, but the one when you open it, I set my vision board there, so I'm seeing it every single day. But I also feel like I've really upgraded my process where it's more of a vision map than just a vision board, so I'm going to take you through that. So firstly, I divide my board on my digital planner into three areas. Who I want to be, how I want to live, and what I want to do. I start with a big brain dump for each area, literally typing out random notes about each part of my life, what kind of house I want to live in, what friendships I want to cultivate, experiences I want to have.

8:49Then instead of going straight to Pinterest I head to ChatGPT. Quick ChatGPT disclaimer is to make sure you're not using a version that is learning from your answers and you're not putting in any super sensitive information that is general ChatGPT hygiene. You can just do this on the settings in ChatGPT if that is what you're using. So everything you've just written answering those specific questions, I put those notes into ChatGPT to write me a day in my life for this time next year if I achieve my goals. Not only is this amazing motivation, honestly read it, to achieve what I want to achieve but it's also a good show to see if you're actually wanting to live the life you're envisioning and if it's not you can go back to the previous stage and go again or just tweak little things.

9:30It's almost like test driving what achieving your goals would actually look like. Then as a final stage almost like a fun reward I get to head to Pinterest and get putting together my vision board in my digital planner and as I said I then set this as my background you could put it inside your wardrobe you could put it on your fucking fridge you could put it as your desktop background whatever it is make it visible honestly there is a high chance otherwise that you are going to do this and you are going to never ever look at it again and that's a waste of your time and a waste of your energy because the time is going to pass anyway, you might as well make it count.

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11:34So on to step three. This is the exciting part and it is goal setting. So I head over to the yearly goals section in my planner, which are organized into six different categories. So there is personal development, relationships, finances, career and business, attitude and mindset, and health. I really find that having categories like these helps to keep things balanced because I think it's really easy to set goals in like work and career but this will make sure that your focus isn't just on something like work but also on things that keep you happy and fulfilled and building like a well-rounded life.

12:10The most important thing about goals that I say every single year is that they need to be smart which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. An example of this is eat healthier, ticks off absolutely none of these boxes but for example make sure you're eating a home-cooked meal every weekday is all of them. If you are struggling to set goals for yourself use chat GPT. I often paste one of my more vague goals into there where I can't really work out what the smart goal would be to me and you can ask it to make it into a smart goal which you can then track all year.

12:44Chat GPT isn't perfect at all but it is so good at organizing information and this is a great example of how to use it to make sure you have a list of goals in every single part of your life that is actually achievable and measurable. Because remember, you cannot achieve something if it is not measurable, by definition. I talk about this all the time. If you've said, I want to see my friends more this year, there is a very high chance you're gonna get to the end of the year. And even if you actually saw your friends more, you are gonna think, do you know what? I didn't do that. And therefore you're thinking, I didn't make the effort to do that.

13:15Or I did that a little bit, but it wasn't enough. And actually what we need to fight by doing that is to make it measurable and to make it all of the smart boxes basically so that you can know when you've achieved something and so that you can know that you've not achieved something because otherwise it's like, yeah, that increase could be 1 % and that could be enough for you or it could be 100 % and it could not be enough for you. So you need to be able to know how to measure a goal to make it actually achievable. The same goes with any single thing that you want to achieve when it comes to success because if you're moving the goalpost all the time or if you are just doing things based on feeling, then you're probably going to be biasing away from yourself which is going to make it a lot harder to actually get to where you want to get to and feel happy about having done so.

13:56So now into step four. Goal setting feels good, you get a dopamine hit every time you set one but let us be real, goals without accountability do not get you anywhere. So we're going to talk about habit tracking and just to explain that a little bit more, I know I gave you a bit of a pep talk on it earlier but when you set a goal you will feel a dopamine hit. Like if you're going through this episode and you're stopping it and starting it and you're doing each step of it you will get a dopamine hit from actually writing down that goal which is great I will encourage this every single day this is literally what I encourage in the productivity method is to set goals for your day so that you know when you've achieved them and also so that you go into the day giving yourself some dopamine around the things you're going to be doing not just being like oh I wish I was at home watching Netflix but the reason that feels good is because basically your brain triggers that dopamine hit almost as if you've reached that goal and that's great as long as you're actually going to go and then reach it if you're not then going to go and reach it basically what you're doing is procrastinating reaching any goals by just setting them and making you feel like you've actually made some progress which is just such a fucking waste of your time like you are sitting here watching this I assume because you want to do good things in 2025 whatever that looks like to you whether that looks like spending your time with your friends whether that looks like making changes in your career, stepping forward in your career.

15:18Whatever that is, you want to make progress in 2025. So do not waste your time by spending time listening to this episode, writing it down, getting the dopamine hits, and then just like leaving that and never seeing it again. It's like, have some self-respect. So when we're talking about habit tracking, this is the most crucial part of the progress. I've done a whole episode on the magic of habit theory, but essentially your year is a collection of 365 days in case you didn't know and the little habits you practice daily are actually what make you see change throughout the year and keep you consistent so the first step you need to do here is to distill your actual goals the big things into habits the small things which you're going to be doing every day again chat gpt can help you here and you can feed it all your goals and ask it to break down every single one into individual habits which will see you reach those goals.

16:08You can also ask it to create a weekly schedule that incorporates these habits to see what it would actually look like in reality and if you're over committing and need to amend your goals. I then feed these into the habit tracker in my planner which is on my dashboard of the digital planner every day. My planner syncs with my daily schedule making it easy to keep track and log progress as I go. So it's very easy to make sure I'm actually sticking to this on the day to day. Step five, staying consistent. once my plan for the year is set I do not just forget about it in case that isn't very very obvious by this point I break my big yearly goals into monthly targets and I keep them realistic and adaptable every month I check in on my yearly goals and I adjust if needed to reflect life changes flexibility is a must when I'm giving you a tough love pep talk I am not saying that you are not going to have things happen over the next year that aren't going to be really fucking hard to deal with and things that might throw off all of these goals and as I've said make you feel like none of this is actually important in the grand scheme of things.

17:13If we think about it work is not anywhere near as important as health and family and all of these things and life throws all kinds of surprises away. Adjusting is very much part of this process. I do the same for my weekly and daily goals making sure each step brings me closer to that day in the life that ChatGPT gave me. So that is it for this planning session. I hope this episode has been not too mean and has you feeling ready to tackle 2025 with clarity, with focus, with ambition, with excitement. Planning is one of the best ways to step into the new year feeling grounded and in control. And if you are looking for a planning tool, I am offering the first 1 ,000 listeners of this episode 50 % off the Productivity Method Digital Planner with the code WORKINGHARD.

17:59If you use the code, you will get the link sent straight to your inbox and basically that has all of this in the actual planning section of the planner so that you can start setting all of this you can do your vision board in there all of that if you then have that as your dashboard the next year you're going to make sure that you are seeing all of those things where you need to be seeing them you are tracking your habits you are tracking your yearly goals you are seeing your vision board and you aren't just setting and forgetting if you did find this episode helpful please subscribe to the podcast it makes a world of difference and allows us to keep bringing inspiring voices to working hard hardly working in 2025 so that we can all get closer to our goals we can all improve our lives I personally learn a fucking load from these guests if you're on Spotify check out the Q &A section below this episode where we can exchange our top strategies for making the most of the year ahead and I will give a planner of the winner's choice to someone who leaves a great tip or trick around planning and so that we can all learn from it and we can all plan an even better 2025 and then we can all come back here in 2026 and go ah I have no more goals to reach I'm so perfect and so is my life

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