Want to make 2022 your best year yet? You don’t need new year’s resolutions. You need a new year’s plan.

January is traditionally a time for resolutions – for resolving to do better. To do more – or less – of something, to change, to be a new person for a new year. 

I’m not a fan of resolutions. 

The thing is, I like my life, my work, my family, myself. I don’t want to be a new person. 

What I do want, is a year filled with things that matter to me. 

I’ve written before about setting goals – mostly writing ones – and I’m sure I’ll write about it again, because goal-setting (and reaching) matters to me. It’s how I achieved my dream of becoming a full time writer, after all. 

But for this new year blog post, I’m going to talk about how I’m setting about planning out 2022 – for all areas of my life, not just my writing. 

Life Segments

Thinking about absolutely everything that could or should happen in the year ahead is a bit overwhelming, so I tend to break things down a bit, splitting my life into different categories to consider in turn. 

I first got this idea from reading Your Best Year Yet, about twenty years ago, on the tube in London, commuting to my first real job, but I’ve seen it everywhere since. That book suggests no more than eight ‘roles’ for your life. Time management guru Laura Vanderkam uses three ‘areas’ to set her quarterly goals for (work, self and relationships).

I tend to use four:

1. Self (covering self care, health, hobbies)
2. Family (including extended family & friends)
3. Career (anything work related)
4. Home (everything from DIY to meal planning)

(Until this month, I’d never really had a consistent name for my life roles or areas, but then I read this great blog post from Jo Dymock at Ochre and Flax about setting a route map for your year, and she called them ‘segments,’ which made me think of a chocolate orange, or possibly playing Trivial Pursuit at the caravan with my family, so now of course I’m calling them that, too.)

Some of our big rocks for the year include:

1. A family wedding in February
2. Plans for a family holiday in April
3. The launch of my debut crime novel (as Katy Watson), The Three Dahlias, in July
4. A longstanding wish to visit Hadrian’s Wall
5. Renovating our bedroom

Normally, I do my career planning quite separately from the family goal setting, but this year, with The Three Dahlias coming out, events around the launch of that (not to mention a conference trip Dr Pembroke is joining me on) have affected the family schedule more than usual. Still, I have set separate big rocks for my work schedule, too, which include:

1. Launch books 2 and 3 of the Heirs of Wishcliffe series
2. Write book 2 of the Three Dahlias series
3. Launch The Three Dahlias
4. Attend several crime festivals/conferences
5. Write two more romances for Mills & Boon True Love

It’s useful at this point to see how the events with fixed dates tie in with more untethered goals. For instance, The Three Dahlias comes out in late July, and we’re attending the Harrogate Crime Festival that weekend (two of my work Big Rocks). Since we’ve already travelled that far, wouldn’t that be a great time to carry on northwards and visit Hadrian’s Wall…? 

We also stop at this point to consider school holidays – how we want to use them, how much time Dr Pembroke wants to take off during each one, how much I need to work during them, whether we’ll spend them here or with family in Wales… It’s a useful way to gauge how best to use Dr Pembroke’s limited annual leave, and make sure I’m not manically on a deadline while also trying to entertain two bored kids, five weeks into their summer holiday. 

It’s worth noting that not all of your Big Rocks might be good things, or at least things you’re excited for. If you have a surgery scheduled, or you know that a particular month will be very busy at work, or a kid has a dance competition every weekend, note those Big Rocks too. They’re part of your life, so your plan needs to reflect it. (And if you have a really stressful time up ahead, make sure to schedule in time to rest and recover after it, too). 

Once the Big Rocks are looking reasonable evenly spread across the year, the next thing to do is look at the many, many things we’d like to do, should circumstances permit. For each segment, we write at least one wish list – sometimes more!

For instance, in the Family segment, we have lists of family adventures we’d like to take (split into local, day trips and bigger trips), people we’d like to visit (or have visit us), things we’d like to do with the kids (one-on-one, or as a family), and so on. The Home wish lists include decluttering plans, DIY, recipes to try, etc. My Self lists include reading lists, TV shows I want to watch, solo adventures I want to take. And my Work lists include blogs to write, things I want to create for my newsletter subscribers (look out for a free short story download in this month’s email, incidentally), new projects to start planning, and many, many other things. 

These lists don’t get written all at once, and nor do they arrive fully formed. They’re things that build and get added to throughout the year. But having a place to keep this information, somewhere to write down every passing thought or good idea, vastly increases the possibility of them actually happening.

Then, every month, when we’re looking at the weekends or free time ahead, we can go back to the lists and see what we’d like to do. When I find myself with a free evening, I can check my TV or reading list. Next time I’m speaking to that friend, I can ask when would be a good time to get together. Wish List items are the grains of sand that fit around the Big Rocks in the bottle of our year.

We’ll never tick of everything on the Wish Lists, of course – but at least they mean we remember the things we wanted to do, and do more of them. There’s always next year, anyway – and they’re great material for deciding next year’s Big Rocks, too. And if there are things on the Wish Lists that we realise we really, really want to make happen in 2022, we can upgrade them to Big Rocks at any point, and schedule them in.

Further Reading:

Here are some more blogs from Time To Write that you might find helpful to plan your writing year:

The writing plan you need to smash your author goals

How to set the right writing goals

6 tips for making time to write

Write your book this year