The Planning Process – How to Make Sure You’re Heading in the Right Direction to Reach Your Goals


Are you on track to reach your goals this year? We all start new years with goals in mind and then at the end of the year, we find out that we didn’t achieve anything. Embarrassing, right? We start the next year with full determination to reach our goal this time. And guess what happens? We don’t accomplish anything meaningful. We keep trying until we find ourselves not getting any closer to where we want to be. You start to dream that if you had done this five years ago, everything would have been different.

Yes, you’re right.

If you could just achieve your goals every year, your life will be different after five years. The question now is how to achieve your goal. The answer is really simple: you need to plan your time to help you achieve your goal, and then do your best to get things done and move forward.

But it all starts with the planning part. If done right, you could be on track to reach your goal, and if done wrong, you’ll surely miss your goals even if you work 80 hours a week.

How do you plan your way to success?

This the million dollar question. Here’s how I plan my time to help me achieve my goal every year growing my business and studying dentistry (and scoring a high GPA).

There are 3 tiers of planning:

  1. The 100,000-foot view
  2. The 10,000-foot view
  3. The 100-foot view

Let’s tackle each one.

The 100,000-foot view

This is the big picture. Here you put your goal in front of you for the next quarter or 100 days or whatever. And then you elaborate the tasks you need to accomplish. You look at things from a very far view. Try to describe all the things you need to tackle in the next 90 days to reach your goal by the end of the year.

Here’s a quick example:

Goal: Get 7 new clients in the next 90 days and increase revenue by $5000

Steps to take:

  1. Search on job boards and try to find 2 new clients
  2. Write a post every 2 weeks and promote it to increase awareness
  3. Cold email 30 prospects I think I could help
  4. Get on the call and convert the people who want to work with me
  5. Over-deliver.
  6. Don’t forget Joe’s work that needs to be accomplished (my old client.)

This way you have a big overview of what you want to accomplish to reach your goal. Don’t skip this step because everything after that depends on it.

The 10,000-foot view

This is where you start to find out what you need to accomplish in the medium run to make sure you can finish all the steps needed and achieve your 90 day goal. The duration here could be 25 days or 2 weeks if you want to have smaller increments. I make it 25 days, but it’s up to you.

Here’s what you do. You find out what tasks you need to accomplish in the duration you’ve set, let’s say 25 days, to help you reach your goal at the end.

Here’s an example of how this could be done based on the previous example:

  1. Search the job board every day. Try to find at least 1 good client.
  2. Write a post and do blogger outreach for 200 people
  3. Cold email 10 people
  4. Get on the call with people who are interested
  5. Finish Joe’s work

You see, all I did is take parts of the big plan and add them here. I try to break things into smaller chunks, so by the end of the duration, I can reach my bigger goal. Now, after you have your 10,000-foot view in front of you, the next part is to zoom in even more.

The 100-foot view

This is where you set your daily tasks that you need to accomplish today. I’m sure you know what to do now :)

You create a to-do list based on the action items in the 10,000-foot view plan.

Here’s a quick example:

  • Check all the previous job requests for the past week
  • Create an outline for my post
  • Cold outreach 3 people

Now, you know exactly what to do. Your job is to do it.

I’m sure you’re thinking…

Why don’t we make it 2 tiers only? Why the extra step?

This is the system I’m following right now. Occasionally, I’ve tried to save some time by skipping the last step. But every time I do, near the end of the 90 days I find myself with a lot of tasks that I need to tackle and I actually end up missing the goal. The extra step is just to save you from being overwhelmed and help you have a better view of what you need to accomplish.

Final thoughts

Planning is essential for your success. This is the format I follow. You just need to adapt it to your life.

Start planning and you’ll know how to stay on track to reach your goal so you can finally reach it.