On the agenda for 2018

After giving a good look at what happened in 2017, it was time to sit down and decide what I would like to see happening in 2018.

Truth is, I did that in one day. I took a day off in December and spent it reviewing and planning. It came to my attention that some people spend weekends on it, sometimes more. I try to manage to put it all in one day. It was a jam-packed one but it gave me a good idea of what to put on the agenda for 2018.

After treating myself to brunch and looking back at 2017, I took a short cultural (and inspirational) break at the art museum. Then I “locked myself” in a coworking space to build the 2018 spreadsheet.

Start with the Why

Before being able to establish a concrete action plan, it is important to define a few elements: purpose, outcomes and themes. Over the past few years, I have been obsessed with unbinding my life from cultural suitabilities. So, no surprise here, my “why” is about freedom of traveling and experiencing the world.

Purpose: In 2018 I will keep on building my dream-life. I will focus on traveling and finding ways to make additional incomes to finance my travels.

Outcomes: At the end of 2018, I will have been paid for something I wrote, have finished paying my car, have visited at least three new countries.

Theme: 2018 is the year of The Vagabond Monkey. By this time next year, I will have found a way to travel for “free”.

It was time to translate that into categorized goals:

• Writing: since it is one way I can monetize my away time, and it is something I love to do.
• Business: I have a good thing going there, I can’t drop everything and run, so I need to find ways to include my business into a new and improved way of life.
• Friends & Family: they could be the first casualties in my new found freedom. How am I going to manage those relationships if I am away?
• Travel: of course, that was the easiest and most fun roadmap to establish…
• Learning: it is a crucial aspect of life. When we stop learning, we dry down. It seemed very important to me to highlight and incorporate that into my daily life.
• Financial (Earning): because, guess what, none of this would happen without a steady cash-flow.
• Financial (Saving): because I want to be prepared for 2019 and beyond…
• Health: you travel better when you’re healthy, so, important to put that on the map.
• Branding: this ties closely to the Writing category and the Business category, and it is a natural follow-up to what I initiated in 2017 with this blog.
• Art: in the same way as Learning, Art is something I want to experience more of in my days. I find my life a lot more inspiring and exciting with a little artistic touch in it. In December 2017, a couple of friends and I decided to kick off a session of The Artist’s Way: 25th Anniversary Edition as a way to bring our inner artist back to the surface. If you’re interested in joining the adventure, let me know and I’ll give you some pointers and access to our Slack channel.
• Relationships: something I still have a little bit of work to do on… But that’s a story for a different blog post.

In the end…

Once I settled on these categories, listing actionnable and S.M.A.R.T objectives was what took the longest. But I’m a marketer, I can’t help myself… In front of each objective, I could then put my next step and a deadline. Now my agenda for 2018 is clear and concise and I can keep an eye on it until I do a Spring review.