Planning Tools for 2025
The holiday fog has started to lift and 2025 is here, whether we are ready or not. While I am currently easing into things (or trying to), my brain is starting to get excited for what 2025 has in store. I’m wrapping up my annual planning process and I am looking forward to sharing some of this year’s goals with you, including my word of the year. I have some big art goals, some big life goals, and some big work at my day job goals, so annual planning is always a delicate process of balancing out new year enthusiasm with realistic expectations based on what is physically and mentally possible. I’m still learning to live in the gain and to celebrate the progress in the small steps I am taking each day. As my ideas continue to come together for what I want to accomplish and feel like in 2025, I thought I would share the tools I utilize to help me process the past year and to organize my thoughts for what is next. In a nutshell, these tools include:
My Year Plan Planning Guide
Happy Planner
Books
Cleaning and Purging
My Yearly Plan Planning Guide
I developed this planning guide in 2023 and it is an amalgamation of all of the different productivity, efficiency, annual planning, and goal setting trainings and books I have read over the years. I wanted to create a basic roadmap for myself so that the whole annual planning process didn’t feel so overwhelming. This guide is divided into sections for reflection, brainstorming, and goal setting and walks me through different steps that are helpful to clarify what I really want to do. This time of year, there are lots of messages from family, friends, work, and society about what we should be doing or what we need to be doing. I try to really sit in the goal setting process for a while so that the things that I want to do really come to the surface. This is not a quick process for me and seems to get longer each year. This year, I started thinking and gathering ideas in November. And those ideas have slowly taken shape during December and the start of January. I like to plan out how I think that the year will go, but my planning serves as a guide and is not set in stone. This year, I am also thinking of my year in terms of quarters for the first time. I’m hoping this will make my big plans seem more manageable and allow to pivot as needed.
Do you have big dreams and goals?
Check out My Yearly Plan, my free planning guide I use to set myself up for success. Inside you’ll find prompts to help you reflect, celebrate accomplishments, dream your big dreams, and of course make yourself to accomplish them. Remember, dreams do not come true by themselves.
Once I work my way through my planning guide, I give it time to simmer and percolate in my brain. Then I sit down and write down more detailed goals and action items. My brain can go all different directions most of the time, so this year I am trying to get very specific for how my goals break themselves down into tasks across the quarter and across months. I use these more detailed plans to help me to decide what to work on each week. Each year I try to spend a little bit more time of setting up systems that make it easier to stay on task and to know what next step I need to take.
Happy Planner 2025 Calendar
I discovered this company in 2023 and it has turned out to be my favorite planner. It gives you both a monthly calendar, a weekly calendar, as well as goal planning tools at the beginning of each month. I use a vertical layout because it gives me three rows of planning spaces so that I can compartmentalize my life between artwork, general life stuff, and my work day. Since my work schedule is usually planned six months to a year in advance due to ongoing projects, I usually try to get my work schedule figured out as much as possible first before I start deciding on art projects and vacations. Along with my planner, I keep a simple spiral notebook. This functions both as an art-work journal and a place where I can jot down ideas so that they do not distract me from whatever I am working on.
Books
The Gap & The Gain
by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan
I listened to this audiobook at the beginning of December and it has had a profound effect on how I am planning the year and how I am trying to reframe how I think about things and measure success. The main tenets of the book are that we are often working towards an ideal in our life, but that this ideal is usually a moving target. As we continue to grow and change the answer to the question, I will be successful when…. is constantly changing. Instead of measuring success by how much we still need to do, they suggest that we should always measure our success by looking backwards, at our past selves, to see how far we have come rather than how far we still need to go. This creates positive momentum in a way that allows us to accomplish more and be happier. This book impacted how I completed the reflection portion of my annual planning. I would highly recommend the audio version to start with because each chapter is followed by a conversation by the authors. I would recommend the book if you want to complete the journaling prompts that the book suggests.
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You Best Year Ever
by Michael Hyatt
This is my second time reading this book, but the first time reading it as part of my annual planning process. What I like about this book is its holistic approach to goal setting. It recognizes that your work goals, your health goals, your relationship goals, etc. never exist in isolation. They all relate to and inform each other. There is also a big difference between achievement goals and habit goals. An achievement goal would be I want to ride in the Triple Bypass bike ride and shave an hour off my 2022 time. A habit goal would be to start a strength training program three days a week. This book gives you reflection prompts, mindset exercises, along with worksheets and templates for creating goals that you will be excited to complete.
Clean my Art Desk
There is nothing better than cleaning off my art desk, wiping everything down, and reorganizing my workspace. I also updated my one thing a day tracker from Bonnie Christine so that I have a clean slate to work from. I cannot overstate how much having this simple little daily tracker helped me keep making slow and steady progress. Even fifteen minutes a day will add up to 146 hours over the course of the year. I also like to hang up my goal planning sheets so that I have them handy. It helps to remind me what I am working towards.
Organize my Supplies
We live in a small apartment so my art supplies can only take up a small footprint. I have a small set of stacking drawers where I keep the art supplies that I do not use regularly. Despite the fact that I do not use them often, these drawers can turn into a disorganized disaster quickly. I also have a hard time saying no to art supplies that somebody else is giving away, even if it is a supply that I do not use regularly, or let’s be honest, have never used before at all. So at the start of the year, I make sure that things are where they are supposed to be so I can find them. I throw out or donate things I no longer need.
Review and Purge Past Work
I have finally been painting long enough that I have quite a stockpile of old work. I used to keep everything, even the bad stuff and the mark-making practice. This year, I decided to go through the two small boxes where I keep my past work with the goal of purging whatever was no longer serving me. While I kept quite a bit, I did end up purging about a third of my artwork. Most of what I got rid of were pieces that I didn’t like, pieces that were actually mess-ups in some way, and tutorials that were useful but not something I need to keep. I think my husband had a harder time with me getting rid of work than I did, so I gave him veto power to keep pieces if he wanted them. I oddly found it a bit liberating. I still kept a lot. There is a lot of my early work that is bad, but it shows how far I have come in only the last four years. I’m more confident that I will create more work that I will like, where before everything seemed precious. I now have an empty box and I cannot wait to see what I am going to fill it with over the next year.
What helps you get ready for the new year?
What are the annual planning tools that you use?