What do you want to accomplish in the next 12 months? As we greet the new year and look forward to making the most of it, it’s important to take some time to identify—and limit—what we most want to do with it.

Otherwise, we’re liable to get to the end of the year and have done plenty of things except give enough attention to what we would have chosen as most important.¹

Man archery bow and arrow by Annie Spratt

1. Brainstorm 10–12 things you’d most like to accomplish in the coming year.

You’ll certainly do more than 10–12 things in a year. But, what are the 10–12 things that are most important for you to accomplish by the end of the year?

These can and should be both personal and professional. We can often tend to think about setting professional goals and ignore personal ones, which can be just as or even more important in the long run. So, it’s important to ensure you have a mix of both.

Do you want to write an article? Spend more time focused on your family? Take a class? (As a hint, if you’re a student taking a class, completing that class successfully should be one of your goals.)

And here’s the magic: a limited list of 10–12 items fills up really fast when you’re looking out over the scope of a whole year. So, if you find yourself with more than 10–12 items in your brainstormed list (like I have), what do you do?

It’s tempting to think we can do it all or fit everything in that we want in the scope of a year, but that’s not very realistic.

The beauty of limiting yourself to 10–12 major objectives you want to accomplish over the following 12 months is that it helps you feel at this planning stage the strain that these goals will put on your time, attention, and resources as the year moves along. Anything that goes on this list ultimately means something else can’t be on it, just like anything you do ultimately means you can’t do something else.

So, to come down to your 10–12 most important objectives for the coming year, you might need to reflect, write down, scratch out, reorder, and otherwise hash and rehash your list over a few days until you’re satisfied with it. That’s okay. The important thing is make space to think and commit to what will be most important to you over the next 12 months.

2. Turn each brainstormed item into a goal statement.

Once you have your 10–12 objectives, take some time to make these objectives into SMARTER goals that are:

Specific. “Write an article” or “spend more time with my family” are too general. Aiming at them is much like trying to hit anywhere in a target rather than in the bullseye. “Write an article about the land promise to Abraham” or “Be home by 5:30 and give my full attention to my family the rest of each weekday” are much more specific targets to try to hit.

Measurable. “Make progress on my dissertation” doesn’t cut it because “progress” is very vague. What counts? In principle, one additional character in your dissertation file could count as “progress,” but at that rate, your project will likely outlive you and still not be finished. “Draft four dissertation chapters” is much better.

Actionable. To “be less distracted while reading” is a great idea, but what do you need to do in order to be this way? Do you need to “Use Freedom to block online distractions during scheduled reading time”? That you can do as you cultivate the habit of deep work.

Realistically risky. A good goal should be doable but stretch you. For instance, if you’ve comfortably maintained a “B” average in your coursework so far, you might set a goal to “complete the biblical theology seminar with a final grade of A.”

Time-keyed. By when do you want to have this goal complete? Or, how often do you want to do it? For example, do you want to “spend two hours a day, five days a week writing my dissertation,” or do you want to “send an article about the land promise to Abraham to a journal by 30 June”? If you’re using a “due by” time key, you’ll want to match that time key to the quarter (or semester) into which you put that goal in step 3 below.

Exciting. Whether a goal is exciting can be related to how much it stretches you, or it might be something you just simply enjoy doing. So, this criterion has more to do with the topic of the goal than with how you frame it. If you look over your goals list and you find something that makes you yawn, ask yourself why, and either remove it to concentrate on something more important or try to reframe it in a way that you can be enthusiastic about it. If your interest in that research project you began last year has waned, how can you adjust course to align it better with your current interests (preferably while still using most or all of your existing material)?

Relevant. If you’re working full time in a non-faculty post outside Europe, have an active family life, and have ongoing commitments in your community, it might be a lot of fun to “spend the semester at INTF,” but it might not be realistic to pull up stakes and start actively moving on this goal in your current circumstances. At the very least, you’d probably want to do a good deal of groundwork first to “plan a semester abroad at INTF” as a stepping-stone goal.

3. Assign each goal to a particular quarter (or semester).

Academic life often revolves around semesters. But, depending on the nature of your academic obligations and how those relate to what else you have going on in your life, you might find it better to think on a quarterly basis.

Either should work, although I’ve found the slightly shorter and more regular quarters to be more helpful. The point is that, in laying out goals over a whole year, it can be tempting to let several slide either in planning or in execution until the very end of the year, when there might not be enough time to complete them.

Instead, of your 10–12 annual goals, assign at most 3–4 to each quarter or semester. Just like limiting yourself to 10–12 annual goals, limiting yourself to 3–4 goals per quarter or semester helps you feel the constraints of that time in your planning process.

You might want to “Draft four dissertation chapters” in this period, but if you have anything else going on—and you probably should—this might not be feasible during that time frame. Instead, consider assigning to one quarter the goal to “draft the literature review for my dissertation.”

4. Each week, ask what you can do to move toward one or more of your quarterly (or semesterly) goals.

If you only have 12–16 weeks to complete 3–4 major goals, you need to be very intentional about what you do each week.

So, however works for you, make it a point each week to ask yourself what you need to do that week that will help you complete the goals you’ve set for that quarter or semester.² Again, 3–4 major activities for the week is probably a rough upper end to aim for, but you’ll obviously do more than 3–4 things each week.

Conclusion

Stephen Covey helped immortalize the advice to “begin with the end in mind” (Effective People, 102–53). By the time December rolls around, the year will be too far spent to do much to change what it involves. So, don’t wait. Begin now, think about how the coming year should look, and start taking deliberate, well-defined steps toward that end.

What big objectives do you have for this year? How will you define and tackle them?